Motiga, a Bellevue video game company, first started building its debut title for PC back in 2012 — long before there was any talk of Windows 10 or Microsoft’s new feature that will let console gamers compete directly against those on PCs.
But Xbox chief Phil Spencer brought an undeniable pitch to the table, and now Motiga’s highly anticipated game, called Gigantic, is about to become the Redmond company’s guinea pig for bridging the gaming chasm.
David Reid, Motiga’s senior vice president of publishing, said he knows gamers love their platforms and the company wants nothing to do with the debate between PC and console.
It’s just creating a place where both sides can come together and compete — from their own machines — in as fair of a way as possible.
“We’re really not so sure who is going to be better,” Reid said.
Gigantic is a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena game with a twist. Two teams of five duke it out, each with a computer-controlled giant that they must fight beside and protect.
There are a lot of unknowns the company is still figuring out before Gigantic beta testers get to try out the cross-platform play for the first time in August and the full game is released for Windows 10 and Xbox One by the end of 2015.
Menus that are perfectly readable on a computer screen may not render well on televisions, and controls have to be mapped from a keyboard and mouse to Xbox controller.
Reid said one thing Motiga has already decided is that cross-platform play is going to be purely opt-in, so you won’t end up competing against players on different machines without knowing. He also said the feature won’t be used for ranked matches.
One aspect he’s particularly excited about is that players will have one account they can use on either platform, letting gamers switch back and forth as much as they like without losing progress.
Motiga is headquartered just down the street from Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters and is led by former Xbox executives, including Reid, who was the director of marketing for Xbox 360. The two companies have collaborated during development and showed the game off onstage together a major gaming conferences.
Motiga says it’s not aware of any other independent studio that’s building a cross-platform game, though Microsoft Studio’s own Fable Legends will also have the feature when it launches this fall.
Reid says he knows the experiment is going to come with some hurdles, but he’s happy to be one of the first to jump onboard.
“We signed up for it. This was an exciting opportunity,” he said. “I expect [cross-platform gaming] to be a much bigger deal moving forward.”
