PAX West Matt Booty Recap

Since joining Microsoft in 2010 to help lead internal game dev teams, Matt Booty has overseen some of Xbox’s biggest moments in gaming over the last decade – including playing a key role in the acquisition of Minecraft 2014 Matt was featured as the Storytime Speaker for PAX West 2022. This weekend, Matt shared information about his thirty years of gaming experience, from arcade and pinball to Xbox. Matt shared his wisdom on how to get into gaming, gave some insights on the future of gaming, and debated who the winner would be in a battle between Master Chief or. Mortal Kombat’s Scorpion.

You can find the entire session archived here. However, we are sharing some clips for your convenience:

The subject of industry culture change: “We want the people making the games to be the same as the people playing them”

The increasing complexity and expectations associated with games: “It used to be you’d ship a game, a little disc would come out, and off it would go, that was the end of it. Now there’s an expectation that there’s gonna be more content… and there’s an expectation it’ll keep growing. But somebody’s got to build that stuff.”

Why is it that so many games are being delayed?: “Some of the processes that we have, have not kept up with how quickly we can make content. One of those is testing… Every single time anything new goes into a big game, the whole game has got to be tested front to back, side to side.”

Editor’s Note: I spoke with Matt after the keynote. He clarified some of his remarks about AI being used in QA testing. “Digital tools have always been core to the evolution of video games. We want to give our teams more time to think creatively and to iterate faster. AI testing doesn’t replace Test or Quality teams. It allows these teams to be more creative and iterative while the automation takes over testing tasks on a larger scale. Our Test and Quality teams are a valuable part of the development process and much of the AI experimentation is being done by our test teams themselves, to free up others from having to spend time on repetitive tasks like scouring large open-world games for texture seams or hunting for gaps in collision boundaries.”

HThere are more chances to get involved in the gaming industry because there is a specialization. “There are so many avenues to get into games, which back in the Space Invader days was not the case.”

The way we play games is changing: “Our Perfect Dark team down in Santa Monica, The Initiative, we just did this big partnership with Crystal Dynamics and I read online ‘this must mean there’s a problem’ – it’s quite the opposite. You’ve got this veteran team at Crystal Dynamics, a big AAA team with over 100 people that becomes available – of course we want to work with them”

Next generation of game developers:: “Games have hit a point where we almost have a responsibility to use the medium correctly… we have the ability to tell stories that change lives.”

Brittney, thank you for having such a thoughtful conversation with Matt at PAX West this weekend. Watch the entire recorded stream by clicking here.