Once the Activision Blizzard deal closes Microsoft will have like 40 studios in countries around the world. That’s a lot of studios who may never see or hear of each other. A Microsoft Gaming GDC would give them a place to meet and share technology.
The difference from the regular GDC is that studios would be able to trade technology and employees for free since they’re all under the same company. It would also promote collaboration. Imagine a quest writing seminar attended by Obsidian, Playground, inXile, and Bethesda where employees learned from each other, made connections, and even switched studios.
Switching studios might be seen as a bad thing in other cases but here, since they’re remaining under Microsoft, they might be given greater flexibility. For example, a quest writer on Starfield might go to work on Fable since their work is done Starfield. Increased collaboration will improve all of Microsoft’s studios and provides more opportunities for employees.
What do you guys think?
With so many studios should Microsoft have their own Game Developer Conference?
There was a video from Bethesda that shared that they did this. They had their own internal developer conference where they shared their current builds and got feedback from each other and helped each other out.
Which goes a bit beyond what GDC does because it’s not often where you see shared builds of games that are in mid-development.
It seems reasonable that MS would do their own across all teams once it’s safe to do so.
I initially said yes to this poll but in hindsight I’m now thinking no.
I’m sure that internally they will do something like this anyway (if not they should). From an outside perspective my employer has a whole team which ensures the whole organisation are sharing knowledge and best practices (and we don’t even do development).
For sharing knowledge externally GDC should be kept as the main event.
Yea they should, since Sony left E3 a ton of Sony gamers now think these E3 style conferences are no good, their was a game industry decaxes before sony and their will be one after sony leave the industry. I think with the amount of studios Xbox could easily have a multi day conference You could easily split them out into Xbox, Bethesda, Activison, Blizzard and end up having a steller E3 like event even if it’s only xbox related.
I think once everything is back to some form of normal after Covid they should do something like this to replace E3.
I’m pretty sure there was a video during covid where they confirmed Microsoft studios have online meetings on a like month to month basis to discuss technology and game development topics to help each other out
This sounds like something that can just be done via voluntary lunch n learns or whatever other existing mechanisms Microsoft has for knowledge sharing.
Microsoft the company has stuff like this but it’s more of a company party type thing, I think a social XGS get together could be cool, but the amount of people they have now it’ll be hard to do lol, maybe it’s more of a senior high up people in each studio not every single dev but that might be a bit icky as in a two tier class type thing.
All the studios will for sure share tech and knowledge, they do it now. I’m sure all the teams have a line to each other and are able to ask for help, I wouldn’t be shocked if there was like a XGS/Bethesda wide slack/teams/discord server to connect super quick with each studio.
I still think MS should build a dedicated massive team of highly skilled and diverse QA testers that is on call to any studio that needs help. Along with many other in house support studios, I think external support studios will become more and more worth their weight in gold so they’re going to be snapped up or contracted by many other teams.
