Head of Xbox Phil Spencer recently sat down with Kinda Funny Games to talk about a bunch of things, with a notable point of discussion being classic games on Xbox Game Pass. Phil Spencer believes that classic games are an essential part of the service, and those games doing well absolutely incentivises studios to push for reboots.
Basically, Xbox has a bunch of statistics that help determine the popularity of a game on the service which can then be used to ascertain whether rebooting a franchise is a viable option. Phil Spencer cites Fable as an example, whose reboot was easily green-lit by executives within the company since prior entries of the franchise are doing so well on the service.
“Seeing more people playing something like Prey, or Dishonored or going back to Fable and [that] you can talk about those games, for us as we sit back as a creative organisation and watch what people are interested in, it gives us more data to think about things that we might pick up and take forward with new ideas and new teams that might want to go do that.”, Phil Spencer states.
Xbox already has a number of legacy franchises making a return, with Battletoads and Perfect Dark being two standout highlights among others. There’s still no information on Fable‘s release, but we’re hoping to hear from Playground Games sometime soon.
