Matt Booty - the Head of Microsoft Studios - has been doing a lot of press lately, following the recent Xbox Games Showcase. Previous headlines focused on his declaration that first party development for Xbox One had ceased. The Hollywood Reporter has now cornered him on the subject of a possible Xbox augmented/virtual reality headset, although the interview did begin with a discussion about the company's Starfield IP being a good candidate for a movie or TV series adaptation. Booty swiftly shifted the focus onto current projects: "I don't have anything to share around there on Starfield, but I love your point that the worlds that we create in games, the characters that we create … people build entire digital hobbies around and invest hundreds of hours in (them), so it's cool to see linear media, as we call it, recognize that. We have our Halo TV series with Paramount; we have season one and we're shooting season two now. We've got the Minecraft movie coming up with Jason Momoa. We just recently announced that we've got the Gears of War franchise with Netflix."

Arch rival Sony is already two generations deep into gaming AR/VR headsets, and Microsoft has not produced an answer to PlayStation VR. Things have also gone quiet on the business-focused HoloLens product front. Phil Spencer did hint that the Xbox One X console was powerful enough to run a VR headset, but that was many years ago and he has since stated that leadership is not interested in exploring that market. Booty's response to the Hollywood Reporter's query also repeats his colleague's view: "I think for us, it's just a bit of wait until there's an audience there. We're very fortunate that we have got these big IPs that have turned into ongoing franchises with big communities. We have 10 games that have achieved over 10 million players life-to-date, which is a pretty big accomplishment, but that's the kind of scale that we need to see success for the game and it's just, it's not quite there yet with AR, VR." He claimed that their traditional model has "150 million active players across first-party (titles) every month," with cloud gaming contributing very little to that population: "For us, to be clear, it is a very, very small market. I'm not even sure you would call it a market yet, in fact." This tidbit is very intriguing given the big marketing push behind Xbox Cloud Gaming, and certain regulators deeming Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard a threat to competition within that market.Booty continued his thoughts on the surprisingly low cloud gaming population: "It's very small usage and very small audience...it's something that we consider almost more experimental that we're trying out to see how it works. We just announced it. We've signed some great partnerships with NVIDIA and announced some other partnerships. So for us, it comes back to the content, which is really my focus." Continued business growth seems to dictate the Xbox division's direction: My teams have done an awful lot to make sure that we support touch interface and touch first so (the games) can be played on touch-first devices. But again, that content that we're streaming is our frontline content. We're not building anything specific for that. I think there's still a lot of economic issues to work out in terms of the cost as well. So in a weird way, it ties back a bit to your AR/VR question, and it's something that we feel we need to be up on being involved with the technology. We have some great partners that we're giving our content to, but for me, it comes back to the content and focusing on things that have scale."