You know who has the best first-party games? Microsoft! It’s true, because they said so.<\/p>\n
“I would ask you to go and look at some of your data, just to compare first party performance over the course of this lifecycle, because I think our first party performance in terms of quality bars and units per title this shift has been superior to our competition’s,” Xbox man Dennis Durkin tells IndustryGamers.<\/a><\/p>\n As the article points out, however, critics don’t quite agree – Microsoft Game Studios titles hold an average of 75 over on Metacritic, while Sony and Nintendo come out at 73 and 77 respectively.<\/p>\n And sales don’t necessarily mean much either, or Wii Sports would have to be considered a “superior” title too, and nobody wants that to happen.<\/p>\n “But certainly we think first party is an important tool and you can’t dispute titles like Forza, which has consistently come out on a repeated cadence and sold multi-million units. You can’t dispute things like Fable, which again, on a very consistent pace, has come out and sold 2 and 3 million units a pop,” adds Durkin.<\/p>\n “And now new titles, like Kinect Sports, which has come out and sold over 3 million units. So we are, not only building existing IP and incubating around titles like Halo and others, but really building new IP in new areas. And that’s going to be core to us… to build those experiences and monetize those.”<\/p>\n