Microsoft made more waves recently when they announced at X018 it would be acquiring two new studios in Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment.
Following the acquisition announcement, inXile’s founder Brian Fargo recently spoke to Eurogamer about how the studio will be changing moving forward now that they belong to Microsoft. For the most part, Fargo said that the day-to-day will remain almost exactly the same as it was before. “It’s almost like if my guys didn’t know we were bought, they wouldn’t even realise,” Fargo explained. “Everything literally remains the same.”
As for the benefits of working under Microsoft, that means more funds to work with for inXile. In the past, the studio has resorted to crowdfunding platforms such as Fig to support their past ventures. Of course, that means crowdfunding will no longer be in the cards. Fargo explained this by saying, “In some ways we’ve had one hand tied behind our back, and now, no longer.”
In addition to more funds, Fargo also said that the studio will now be able to expand a bit. That said, Fargo said he doesn’t believe inXile will ever be a company that supports hundreds of developers at once.
“In the short-term we talk about increasing it 30 per cent or so. We’re not trying to become multi-hundred-person teams but just filling the holes we’ve been desperately wanting to: having a full-time audio person, having a full-time lighting person, having a cinematics person – these things that could help us improve what we’re doing.”
Of course, the biggest question about the future of inXile working under Microsoft involves what they’ll be developing first as one of the publisher’s studios. Well, Fargo said that inXile currently has an unannounced project in the works that Microsoft is “quite keen on.” Moving forward, they’ll evaluate how they can make that game better now that they have more resources at their disposal. Whatever this mysterious new game is, it seems likely to be the first title that will be published by Microsoft and will remain exclusive to PC and Xbox One.
It’s interesting to know that inXile already has something else in development other than Wasteland 3, which is still scheduled to launch next year on multiple platforms. We’ll have to wait some time to see more of what comes from inXile now belonging to Microsoft, but I for one am excited to see what they can create with these new resources.