The latest milestone in Xbox’s ongoing brutal reset consisted in part of studios being reassigned within the sprawling gaming division’s internal org chart. One of the biggest moves was putting Obsidian Entertainment under Bethesda. The maker of Avowed and The Outer Worlds had previously operated independently within Xbox. Will that still be the case, or could the renowned RPG maker become more of a support-style studio in service of a Fallout-first development model? Jill Braff, Microsoft’s president of Bethesda and Casual Games, spoke to some of these concerns in a recent email to the studio.
“The creative identity and strengths that make Obsidian distinct will remain at the core of their studio and work,” Braff wrote, according to a copy obtained by Aftermath. “[CEO] Feargus [Urquhart] and the Obsidian leadership team will continue to lead Obsidian, with the studio reporting to me. Bethesda Game Studios will continue to lead the Fallout franchise. Together, the teams will build on their longstanding relationship and the early work already underway on a new Fallout project, with more to share in the months ahead. This structure supports the franchise-led model we’ve been strengthening while keeping accountability for both the studio and the franchise clear.”
The “franchise-led model” mentioned here seems significant. Prior Xbox leadership made a lot of noise about remaining unusually hands-off toward its studios, allowing them a wide berth when it came to what games they’d make and how the visions for them were defined. This is the model that led Obsidian Entertainment in particular to ship not just Avowed, a first-person fantasy RPG with shades of The Elder Scrolls, and The Outer Worlds 2, a shooter RPG in the mold of Fallout, but also Pentiment, a completely original story-driven detective game presented in the visual style of late medieval period manuscripts and woodcut prints.
Under new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, Microsoft’s gaming division is doubling down on its established franchises. Those happen to be Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and not Avowed or The Outer Worlds. Can a studio truly maintain a distinct identity if it reports to Bethesda and is developing a sequel to a franchise that Bethesda is in charge of? That will be the big question facing Xbox’s latest round of layoff-fueled restructuring. It’s notable that Obsidian wasn’t immune to the recent round of cuts either, losing dozens of developers in the process.
For an early preview of what the “franchise-led model” looks like, we might look to Activision and Blizzard. An army of studios collaborate on each annual Call of Duty release, many of their previous identities subsumed by the resource-intensive needs of each new blockbuster sequel. Blizzard, on the other hand, has large teams within it, each dedicated to a different franchise like World of Warcraft or Diablo. Both models might produce great games. They probably make a lot more money than what Xbox was doing previously. But fostering and maintaining unique creative identities and strengths for individual studios doesn’t necessarily fall within that remit.