More quotes from Microsoft’s head of gaming and Xbox chief Phil Spencer’s interview with Kinda Funny Games have caught attention online.
As previously reported, Spencer issued a public apology over the launch state of its newest big first-party release “Redfall”. The title was plagued by a number of technical issues, along with plenty of poor reviews that go beyond mere bugs.
Moving away from that particular title and towards the more general future of Xbox itself, Spencer was asked if the company has focused too much on PC and streaming at the expense of creating great games for consoles.
Spencer says Microsoft would be wrong to think that just building a library of great console titles could help it claw back market share – that is why the company is more focused on enabling customers to play their games on any screen:
“We’re not in the business of out-consoling Sony or out-consoling Nintendo. There isn’t really a great solution or win for us. And I know that will upset a ton of people, but it’s just the truth of the matter that when you’re third place in the console marketplace and the top two players are as strong as they are and have, in certain cases, a very, very discrete focus on doing deals and other things that kind of make being Xbox hard for us as a team, [and] that’s on us, not on anybody else.
I see commentary that if you just built great games, everything would turn around. It’s just not true that if we go off and build great games, then all of a sudden, you’re going to see console share shift in some dramatic way.”
Part of the problem began almost exactly a decade ago. In the late 2000s, there was no question that Xbox 360 was ahead of Sony’s PS3 for much of the seventh generation of consoles.
Then Sony’s console began to catch up thanks to a focus on big-budget AAA single-player exclusives – delivering titles like the “Uncharted” trilogy, “The Last of Us,” “Infamous,” “Demon’s Souls,” “Resistance,” “Ratchet & Clank” and more.
On the other hand, Microsoft shifted focus more towards the cloud, live service gaming and making the Xbox a home media hub – leading to the E3 press conference in May 2013 revealing the Xbox One.
Looking back that event is seen as a pivotal moment when things changed for Microsoft. The result was PS4 winning the next generation of consoles – pivotal as many people moved from disc libraries to digital libraries. Spencer says:
“We lost the worst generation to lose in the Xbox One generation, where everybody built their digital library of games. So, when you go and you’re building on Xbox, we want our Xbox community to feel awesome, but this idea that if we just focused more on great games on our console that somehow we’re going to win the console race, I think doesn’t really lay into the reality of most people.”
Spencer adds that 90% of the people who buy a console every year already own a console with a digital game library that is a part of that ecosystem:
“This is the first generation where the big games that they’re playing were games that were available last-gen… I see a lot of pundits out there that kind of want to go back to the time where we all had cartridges and discs and every new generation was a clean slate, and you could switch the whole console share. That’s just not the world that we are in today. There is no world where Starfield is an 11 out of 10 and people start selling their PS5, that’s not going to happen.”
Xbox’s focus now seems to be on the shift to its GamePass subscription service, the mobile space and cloud gaming as they aim to meet the demands of developers who want their games to be playable on as many devices as possible:
“We have this unique vision because we see what creators want to do. Creators want to build games that can meet players on any screen, people play with their friends regardless of what other screen they’re on.
The console is the core of the Xbox brand, there’s no doubt, so we will stay focused on making sure that the console experience is awesome.
But I know some people want to hold us up as just being a better green version of what the blue guys do, and I’m just going to say there’s not a win for Xbox in staying in the wake of somebody else.
We have to go off and do our own thing, with Game Pass, with the stuff we do with xCloud and the way we build our games.”
The comments come ahead of this year’s Xbox Showcase on June 11th. Last year’s Showcase offered a twelve-month plan of games, to which Spencer says in the interview, “We didn’t deliver”.
With this year’s Showcase, he says they’re going to “announce some things that people haven’t seen” along with new games and updates on previously announced titles. In terms of the goal for this year’s Showcase, he says:
“We have to do it at quality, we have to do it on time, and we have to show people what they’re actually going to see. We have to show gameplay. And I think I’m kind of beyond that – we have to put great games in the hands of our players. There’s nothing else.”
This year’s Showcase will be directly followed by a presentation offering a deep-dive into Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG “Starfield” – a game that is already being discussed as a potential make-or-break title for the Xbox brand.
Source: VGC
