Posted in: Games, Games Finance, Microsoft, Video Games | Tagged: coronavirus, covid-19, Phil Spencer, xbox

Phil Spencer Thinks Gaming Will Be Impacted By COVID-19 By 2021

Published Thu, 14 May 2020 07:40:47 -0500

Xbox head Phil Spencer believes the greatest impact from COVID-19 on the video game industry is still yet to come. According to a report from Business Insider, Spencer believes that, despite the Xbox Series X's impending holiday launch later this year, problems could still be mounting.

"Mocap is just something that's basically stopped. We're not going into mocap studios," said Spencer. "If you had all your animation captured and you're doing touch up in more individual art production and in areas like textures and other things, you're in a better position. If you're waiting for a lot of either large audio work — when it's with symphonies and other things — or mocap, you're held up right now and you're making progress in areas that you are."

Phil Spencer believes COVID-19 will impact the game industry more in early 2021.

He added that games currently set for summer and fall this year shouldn't be impacted, but the ones planned for next year may be in jeopardy. Still, the silver lining is that developers still have time to adapt to the changes and roll with the punches that the pandemic has brought with it.

"Even though we're obviously not traveling to China, we feel good about our progress on hardware," he explained. "I've got my take-home console downstairs and I'm playing on it most nights, and I feel good about the software updates that we're doing. From the kind of pomp and circumstance around launches, you might find a time where there's some impact, some things that were going to launch, and maybe they moved a little bit."

Despite the Xbox Series X's debut being months away, we've still yet to see actual gameplay or additional information about the console just yet. The most recent Inside Xbox showed off plenty of new games that would be seen from third-party developers in time, but there were no first-party games shown off at that time. Hopefully, we'll learn more in the coming weeks.

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