Xbox's Chief Content Officer Reveals Blizzard Is Helping With Fable

There are often questions from observers about how closely studios under the same parent company collaborate. Some publishers prefer to keep their studios separate, in case they lose the spark that made the studio worth buying in the first place. Others want their subsidiaries to be on the same 'team', sharing technology and occasionally collaborating directly.

According to Xbox's recently promoted chief content officer, Matt Booty, Xbox Game Studios are working more closely together than you probably thought.

A character faces off against a bloated zombie in State of Decay 2.

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By Johnny Flores Jr.

"It is the case that we got a lot of different kinds of studios, and they've all got their own cultures, so we think of it as a culture of cultures," Booty said in an interview with the Official Xbox Podcast (via Windows Central). "I see a big part of my job is to provide just enough connection and just enough structure across those that they can communicate with each other, that they can share things back and forth, but never to the point that we're coming in over the top trying to change who they are."

Fable 2026 trailer image of people wandering in a country village.

This most often takes the form of technology and technique sharing — we once heard from Bethesda that they consulted with id Software and MachineGames regarding first-person shooter combat. According to Booty, the highly-regarded cinematics team at Blizzard has been helping Playground Games with cutscenes in the upcoming Fable reboot.

"We've really seen a lot, once we build those connections, of teams starting to share things with each other... There's a lot of examples of that. One, maybe just to sort of show a more complicated round trip, you had State of Decay 2 which had some pretty sophisticated technology for doing saved shared worlds, and how you sort of save in this persistent state, and the team at Obsidian, which is a really small team that built Grounded, took that tech to use in Grounded, but then the people at Obsidian kind of added to it, and now it's gone full circle back to Undead Labs to be in State of Decay 3," Booty revealed.

Xbox Game Studios has become quite the sprawling empire over the past decade, with a wide range of studios now operating under the company umbrella. If the World of Warcraft cinematics team makes Fable's cutscenes better, then I will forgive the oligopolistic implications of these acquisitions.