In a recent podcast, Xbox head Phil Spencer spoke about the company’s intentions at E3 2019 in the wake of Sony’s absence, saying Microsoft will “be as big as we’ve ever been.”
In Episode 633 of the Major Nelson podcast (via Digital Trends), Spencer says, “This is going to be a fun E3 for us. There was some news about E3 in the fall [referring to Sony foregoing E3 2019]. We had a discussion internally. Should we go big? Should we save some money? We decided no, we’re going to do our thing and we’re going to go and be as big at E3 as we’ve ever been. And I love that opportunity.”
As for what we can expect from Xbox during E3 2019, Spencer says “I’m looking forward to this year. I think we’re still going through some of the internal discussions about how much long term versus how much near term do we talk about… The content that we have will be great, we’ll talk about our future.” They go on to discuss hardware, but don’t talk concretely about the next console generation.
During the podcast, they also discussed what Microsoft’s now-large stable of first-party developers are up to, and what these expansions mean for Microsoft. Spencer said, “The capability that we have now as a first-party organization I do think it will continue to get bigger, but what we have right now is so different than the position we’ve been in in the last five years, which is awesome.
“I’ve seen what Ninja Theory’s working on next and what their pipeline looks like… I saw what Playground’s working on next, I saw what Rare is working on next and their continued growth and success with Sea of Thieves.
“The real goal with the studios for me is to get a large enough studio base where we can delight and surprise ourselves and our fans with games, and it’s on a regular cadence, so we’re not always pinched to say ‘okay, well what can we announce?’ Now we can say ‘what do we have to announce, and which of these things do we actually want to announce, and what do we want to let sit and percolate a little longer.’ It’s been a while since we were in that position with our internal studios.”
Microsoft appears to be striking while the iron’s hot as far as Sony’s absence at E3 is concerned. When Sony made the announcement that it would forego E3 2019, the company said it would be “exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019.” Sony had also confirmed that there would be no PSX 2018, which has left a hole in PlayStation announcements leading up to this year’s E3.
During E3 2018, Microsoft announced it had acquired four studios and started building one from the ground up, which includes Playground Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory and Compulsion Games along with the new Santa Monica studio The Initiative. During XO18 in November, Microsoft announced the acquisition of two more studios: Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment.
While many of these studios won’t have games ready for quite some time, it’s possible we’ll get an announcement or two from them during E3 2019.
Colin Stevens is a news writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.