One of the most representative sagas of the good work of Microsoft in recent years has been Ori. Both Blind Forest and Will of the Wisps have enjoyed great success with critics and audiences, even moving the franchise to the Nintendo Switch arena.
With the study’s next title in mind, its director Thomas Mahler has responded on ResetEra to Phil Spencer’s statements about Bungie’s departure from Microsoft. The person in charge explains that disagrees with Spencer and reasons his view about leaving the study.
“I think Bungie was interested in creating their own ‘platform’, a game that people can play everywhere, on all systems, something where players are globally connected to each other. No limits.
That would never be possible with Microsoft, not even with today’s Microsoft. Would Microsoft agree to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a game that the developer also wants to port to PS5, so everyone can play together? I have my doubts”.
Mahler criticizes Microsoft’s policy of playing without barriers, since for him they do not act accordingly. All in all, he acknowledges that the big three in the industry (Sony, Xbox and Nintendo) they are afraid of changes and therefore create “walled gardens”.
The reasons for your next game to be cross-platform
Moon Studios is already working on its future project, which will not be exclusive to Xbox and it will be multiplatform thanks to funding from Private Division. Mahler has related the reasons that led him to make this decision:
“We’ve always had so many players saying they love Ori, but hate that they can’t play it on PlayStation. Well why not? Because it was funded by Microsoft, they make the decisions. Fortunately, we got Microsoft to allow us to port Ori to Nintendo Switch, but that wasn’t free and they probably only allowed it because the title was small enough not to cause any problems.
Our next game has a big vision where we want everyone to be able to play together, on all systems, where Moon owns the platform and the IP and we can steer it in the best direction to hopefully make as many of us happy as possible. persons. without having to tell some of them they’re out of luck … because of business.
I think gamers don’t necessarily care about the business side of it all, they just want to play games that make them happy. And by creating a walled garden, you are directly or indirectly simply lighting the flames of platform warfare hooligans who just want to see someone win and someone else fail.
The director puts Minecraft as one of the great examples of the benefit of being multiplatform and notes that “personally, I wish Microsoft had the guts to move forward with their vision.” Finally, he has exposed what for him it would be the ideal context in the industry.
“Your goal as a platform owner should be to make the games better played on your console, not to force people to buy your console because you are creating an artificial barrier for other players who couldn’t afford to buy the system. I hope to experience it. enough to see the industry embrace this kind of openness. “