Phil SpencerCEO of video games at Microsoft and director of Xbox, seems to have entered a phase of excess of honesty as a result of the brutal hit that Redfall, the latest video game developed by Arkane, has hit. The boss and visible face of Xbox has participated in a Kinda Funny Games podcast in which he has made a series of somewhat surprising statements regarding the competition with Sony PlayStation and Nintendo.
Phil Spencer was asked if Xbox, as a video game division, has stopped paying enough attention to consoles to focus too much on PC. The executive responded to that by saying that Microsoft would be wrong to think that just making great video games could make Xbox outsell Sony and Nintendo.
Spencer has stressed that his company follows a different strategy from that of the Japanese giants in the industry, since Microsoft is more focused on making developers able to allow their customers to play from any device or screen. On the other hand, he acknowledges that Xbox consoles have a tough time against their rivals: “There really isn’t a great solution or win for us. And I know that’s going to upset a lot of people, but the truth is that when you’re third in the console market and the top two players are so strong, and in certain cases they have a very low-key approach to doing business and other things, they make being Xbox difficult for us as a team. That depends on us and no one else.”
“I see comments that if you just make great games, everything would change. It’s just not true that if we go and make great games, all of a sudden you’re going to see a dramatic change in console sharing.. We lost the worst generation to lose in the Xbox One generation, where everyone built their digital library of games. So when you go and you’re building on Xbox, we want our Xbox community to feel amazing, but this idea that if we focus more on great games on our console, we’re somehow going to win the console race, I think It doesn’t really fit the reality of most people.”
Phil Spencer is right to point out that creating great Xbox exclusives doesn’t have to be a silver bullet that sends Microsoft’s console division soaring. However, and taking the data from Metacritic, it is no less true that two of the brand’s most powerful IPs, Halo and Gears of War, have fallen considerably compared to some exclusives from Sony and Nintendo that have managed to maintain the level before the specialized criticism, which, on the other hand, is increasingly questioned, especially when it comes to certain jewels on the scene indie.
Microsoft already had a lot more than Halo, Gears of War and Forza Horizon before the Zenimax purchase, since it owns what was one of the best video game developers of the 90s of the last century, Rare. But it is seen that Microsoft took over Rare not so much with the intention of nurturing the Xbox catalog as of annoying Nintendo. In fact, some executives from the Redmond giant came to believe that they had taken over Donkey Kong, which is obviously far from true.
While Donkey Kong was actually a borrowed IP, Rare did develop a notable number of IPs that it still retains, but most of these don’t fit the Xbox user profile. On the other hand, there is the fact that Perfect Dark, which became one of the greatest colossi ever seen in the history of video games when it was released in 2000 for Nintendo 64, has been in the drawer for more than a decade and a half, despite that it is a license that on paper does fit the Xbox user profile.
Other interesting statements by Phil Spencer is that for him many experts, and possibly the Japanese competition, have an outdated vision of the industry: “I see a lot of pundits who want to go back to the time when we all had cartridges and discs and every new generation was a clean slate and you could change the entire console share. That is not the world we are in today. There is no world where Starfield is 11 out of 10 and people start selling their PS5, that’s not going to happen”.
Phil Spencer’s statements suggest that Xbox, as a division of video games, could focus more on services and PC and less on consoles. This smells a bit like the company is beginning to accept defeat on consoles to focus their efforts on the areas where they are strongest.
