Xbox Games marketing general manager Aaron Greenberg has discussed Microsoft’s future and if they will acquire more studios. His answer did not rule out the possibility of more expansion.
In an interview with Twinfinite, Greenburg discussed studio acquisitions, the Xbox Game Pass, and more with Twinfinite news editor Giuseppe Nelva. During the interview, Nelva asked with the studios recently acquired by Microsoft- including Double Fine Productions– would there be more? Greenburg gave no definitive answer, stating that while they “felt good” with the number of studios and projects, they had been impressed enough to add more on their plate before:
“Giuseppe: You did acquire tons of studios, so… are you done or is there more coming?
Aaron Greenberg: It’s a tough question to answer. What I would say is, we were very deliberate. I think Phil spoke to this as well: there was a period of time in which we were very focused on adding more content to our first-party studios.
At E3 a year prior we announced five new teams that joined. Then we added two more at XO, and then Double Fine this year.
It’s been exciting and it’s been great getting to know all these teams, going out and sitting down with Ninja Theory, or the team at Obsidian or inXile, and seeing the stuff that they’re working on now that people know about and the secret things they have in the works that people don’t know about yet. We’ll in time be sharing more about those.
I think we feel good about the level of content we have coming from our internal studios, but we felt good about that and then the opportunity with Double Fine came and that was a perfect fit.
You never know, but right now I think where we are, with our 15 internal studios, we feel really good about the amount of content we’re getting from that, whether it’s supporting Project Scarlett, or supporting Xbox Games Pass on PC and console, we feel like we have a healthy set of content across multiple genres, multiple game types, that will excite our fans.”
Other outlets took Greenburg’s words to be a definitive statement that Microsoft was not interested in acquiring more studios in the foreseeable future. Gaming Street went with “Microsoft says studio acquisitions are no longer top priority”, while Gaming Bolt titled their article “Microsoft Is Done Acquiring Studios For Now.”
The latter caught the attention of Greenburg. As one Twitter user replied to Gaming Bolt’s article stating “The headline has nothing to do with what [Greenburg] said in the interview,” Greenburg responded as well:
“Would agree headline is not exactly what I said. All good, I assume folks have good intentions and just read things from their own perspectives.”
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