Microsoft's Phil Spencer has taken to Twitter recently to point out that making a battle royale game at the moment seems to be a fool's errand. Making a game just for the sake of making a game is not what Microsoft is about, Spencer thinks.
Launching a battle royale game into the current climate borders on stupid, especially if your game doesn't offer more than Fortnite and PUBG and Microsoft are aware of this. Spencer that millions are playing the genre already so coming up with a racehorse of their own is not very high on the company's priority list.
"FNBR is massive, PUBG is huge, new BR variants being built by some very quality devs, I'd rather support unless we find something special in 1P that's a different take." What Spencer means under 1P is first party, so don't expect Microsoft to come out with an exclusively battle royale title.
That's not to say that the battle royale craze might not brush off of Microsoft's games, with many suggesting that the company's Halo franchise could in fact dip its toes into some circle-shrinking survival mayhem. Naturally, this is still heavy speculation so do take that into account.
Of course, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that insisting on taking a piece of Fortnite and PUBG pie is a huge risk. Just ask Boss Key Productions, whose Radical Heights has managed to of its playerbase since the game launched in Steam's early access.
After all, toppling the two would require so much work in terms of in-game features that it's really bordering on the impossible. True, Microsoft could force their way through this "issues" with cash, but we suspect that the entire battle royale hype would be over with by the time they'd have any viable results.
Microsoft are far from the only company that echoed this sentiment. Namely, EA and Take Two also haed their say on the matter, with pretty much identical outcome - all of the companies are more interested in making original games, rather than following current fads.
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