Today, during an episode of the Official Xbox Podcast, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer talked about the possibility of revisiting some of the older franchises by Activision Blizzard and other Xbox studios.
Spencer mentioned during the podcast, that counting Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, and Xbox's own studios, the number of franchises that now Microsoft has in its portfolio is "kind of inspiring" but also daunting.
He feels that the company needs to be "a great custodian" for that content, as it represents memories for people and he wants to make sure that when Microsoft revisits something, they do it with their complete ability -- a motivated team that wants to work on something and make a difference.
He doesn't want it to be something created exclusively for financial gain or for a PR announcement that then doesn't get delivered.
I'm going to start with the teams, and what are they passionate about. That's why I'm excited to go on these visits. And then we'll look at it.I think we've done an OK job at Xbox. I don't think we've done an A+ job on looking at our franchises and revising them.
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I do think with Game Pass we have the ability to pick a couple of franchises every year and amost do like A revisited-- I just made up that term, so it's not a brand.
Spencer believes that looking at all the franchises Microsoft now controls, there is an opportunity to go back, even if it's just "to recognize the moment and what those things meant in gaming's history and do something right with it. Make it available to people through Game Pass."
I think there's an opportunity. There's not a plan for that, but there's an opportunity. If teams want to go back and revisit some of the things that we have and do kind of a full focus on it, I'm going to be all in on that, because I think there's just an amazing trove of things that we can go and touch again.
Spencer brought up the recent Quake 2 remaster as an example. He believes that was awesome as id Software did a really good job revisiting the game and making it current without leaving the history behind, and he'd love to see more things like that.
Asked whether there are franchises that he'd personally like to revisit, he mentioned some of the old Infocom or Sierra games like Zork or King's Quest, simply because they were moments in his gaming experience that really meant something.
He also mentioned that Blizzard has some amazing franchises like Starcraft, but the most important thing is that they're treated with the respect that they respect and they're not treated like a way to have a PR moment.
During the same podcast, Spencer also promised parity (as much as possible) to Call of Duty fans on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.
