This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Matthew Ball has become Chief Strategy Officer at Xbox. In a recent interview at Summer Game Fest 2026, he said: we know what we want to do, but we’re not ready to tell the world yet.
I respect the transparency. But the problem I see goes beyond Xbox — it’s the whole industry. Modern games keep being designed around an implicit assumption: that the player has the desire, the time, and the patience to move through a linear experience from beginning to end. An adventure game, an RPG, a narrative game. You sit down in front of a work that’s meant to be experienced like a 60+ hour film. That’s the unspoken contract.
I get it. Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda, GTA — these were experiences you lived inside. But who are today’s players? Not me at 13. They’re people who grew up on Roblox, Minecraft, TikTok. None of those platforms require you to start from the beginning to make sense of them. The experiences are modular, replayable, fragmented.
Roblox has no ending. Minecraft has no main storyline. TikTok doesn’t have an episode one. These are architectural features that reflect how new generations consume digital experiences.
The player cut
I had a simple idea — maybe a slightly radical one. What if we designed a long game — an RPG, an adventure — not to be shortened, but to be edited by the player themselves?
The basic principle: it’s not about removing content. It’s about giving the player the tools to cut their own version of the experience.
System features
Differentiated build paths. A warrior and a mage in the same adventure should have different routes through it. Imagine the same story, but filtered through your character’s abilities. Pick a character and play a phase based on their particular strengths. Then move on to the next, or replay the same section with a different specialist.
Narrative entry points. Like a TV series with self-contained episodes, each session should have a recognisable beginning and end. A player coming back after three weeks shouldn’t have to piece everything back together mentally — they can re-enter from a designed access point, with a short, contextualised recap.
Variable pacing, not variable difficulty. At the start of each session, the game implicitly asks: do you have 20 minutes or three hours? The flow adapts accordingly. It’s about respecting the player’s real time.
Smart skipping with no penalties. If you’ve already completed a similar quest, or if a section is just dragging, the system lets you summarise and skip it — without losing rewards, ideally. The choice is always yours. The game doesn’t punish you for making it.
The cut as agency. Here’s the truth: in games, freedom lives in what you choose not to do. Cinematic games risk collapsing into map markers, checklists, completion trackers, and so on. All designed to make sure you don’t miss anything.
What would this system actually solve?
The industry’s fear is: less content = less perceived value = fewer sales. But look at Roblox. Every single experience lasts 15–30 minutes, and the platform feels “infinite”. Modular architecture multiplies value. An 80-hour RPG that respects your rhythms is worth more than an 80-hour RPG that makes you feel guilty every time you stop playing.
Matthew Ball declined to answer a lot of questions. But the one the host never asked him is this: are you rethinking the product format, or just the platform?
Because if games keep assuming a player who’ll sit down for 40 hours straight, you won’t lose the next generation to Roblox. You’ll lose them because you didn’t change the language. Roblox is just the language they already speak.