Phil Spencer, long cast as Xbox’s saviour, may be remembered as the man who killed it
Phil Spencer, long cast as Xbox’s saviour, may be remembered as the man who killed it
27 Comments
Guys a tool, lies all the time….
I mean objectively, he has had quite some time to turn things around. He made Microsoft spend hundreds of billions of dollars in that time on subscriptions and acquisitions, but the end result is still the same. Market share remains firmly in 3rd place for them and it’s not looking good. Especially with the 1st party output being criticized so heavily.
Don Mattrick’s hubris, disregard for peoples concerns, seeming scorn for Xbox fans, and “we’ll tell you what you want” condescending attitude is what killed it. Many contributing factors of course, but there has been mostly nothing but negativity surrounding Xbox since his disastrous Xbone reveal.
Phil Spencer has done precious little except spend billions of dollars fruitlessly in order to right the ship before it’s inevitable crash into the rocks.
Yeah he wasn’t that great of a boss honesty.
microsoft should start selling real estate with the amount of free space phil spencer seems to occupy in people’s minds
I stopped thinking of him as the savior for awhile
But in our world ‘Spencer’ has spent ten years and gargantuan amounts of money taking Xbox from third place to third place, and that is not the market’s fault. If the writing isn’t on the wall for Xbox as a whole, then it certainly could be for him.
> To be clear, I feel bad for Spencer
Sure.
I always feel bad for millionaires who actually are in power positions to decide and change stuff.
Can someone loop me in on what is happening with Xbox that everything is doom and gloom? I’m out of the loop.
I think if Xbox dies out Microsoft will probably just pivot to only selling games and maybe still selling Xbox controllers for Windows.
I just can’t understand why they want to die on this hill that first party games don’t matter that much. It’s like the thing that matters the most. When people think of playstation, they think of spiderman, god of war, last of us. They’re console movers. Once you get people into the console, they get the rest of their games there too.
why on god’s green earth would someone be so stupid as to say games don’t sell consoles? You can’t have all these goofy ahh releases and think the perception of xbox is going to be carried that hard by game pass
I hope they continue selling the disc version of their consoles.
I haven’t bought an Xbox since the 360, and it was precisely because of the lack of worthwhile first party games.
xbox ended as a brand in 2015ish
Nah.
Xbox isn’t dead and isn’t going anywhere.
If only Xbox focused on putting out excellent video games…
Xbox, like most Microsoft products, feel absolutely directionless. Do you want to be a hardware manufacturer, and produce first party titles? No? Then why spend billions to aquire exclusive rights to entire studios? Oh it’s to fill out the gamepass catalog? OK so where’s the slew of games from all these studios? Oh they don’t exist yet? So why buy the studio if they don’t have anything even remotely close to ready. Don’t you want to see some immediate return on your investment? You don’t? You’re playing the long game? The long game doesn’t work with a subscription model. It needs a steady stream of major releases to keep gaining new subscribers.
You had a model that worked during the 360 era. Release quality first party exclusives, and people will buy. But instead you let your image stagnate the only first party ips of note you’ve created since that era is still halo, and to a lesser extent gears, but both of those franchises have been ran into the ground, because you have nothing else to fill the gap with. Even after all those acquisitions. I shouldn’t say nothing else Xbox has IPs but they’re so poorly managed nothing ever comes out, I’m looking at you scale bound.
I told my boss this before I left work as we were talking games is I look for new experiences in games not old ones and it’s why I look at exclusives. Typically with Sony or Nintendo I can look forward to the experiences that their exclusives can bring be it something like Xenoblade chronicles 3 or say god of war or recently a game that caught my attention stellar blade with it’s awesome demo playing like a combination of DMC5 and lies of P with a mix of nier. When I look at Xbox I see they’ve acquired so much but have next to nothing to show for it and nothing for me to think “wow I wanna experience that”. They need to seriously look at what their developers are making and give resources to something like a Hifi Rush to make some good and make it amazing with their pool of cash
Phil isn’t the problem as much as Don Mattrick was. Xbox would be in a far worse position if Phil hadn’t taken over. That being said, it should **not** have taken a decade for him to turn things around.
Hot take: he might be killing Xbox, but he’s saving gaming.
Short version: AAA games are expensive to make, and aren’t getting cheaper. Developers are more hesitant to spend the money on making games that might flop, and console exclusivity diminishes their maximum potential revenue: two console releases is 2x the profit (theoretically). Consoles try to overcome this shortfall with profit sharing deals and other money agreements I’m too lazy to get into.
Microsoft can encourage more studios to develop AAA games by promising non-exclusivity (thereby increasing potential revenue), and also maximize the profits of their own studios (Bethesda etc) by putting it on more devices. Microsoft’s survival strategy is to be more of an “ecosystem” (console, PC, streaming) and less about the console itself.
TL;DR The future of gaming is console-agnostic because AAA games cost too much and exclusivity limits potential profits.
Are we forgetting Don Mattrick? Look, Phill Spencer could be doing a better job, but he has earned a lot of good will after saving the brand. I’m half sure that Don Mattrick was a double agent working for Sony to bury Xbox.
Xbox games on PS is in the best interest of Xbox. Digital sales and distribution of software is more important than having a fixed hardware unit.
Phil Spencer is merely transforming Xbox into what Satya Nadella wants out of Microsoft. And Nadella knows what he is doing, look at how much Microsoft grew under him as CEO vs Balmer.
More platforms, means for avenue of sales, means more saturation of software on the market.
A $500 console, sold at a loss can’t compete with sales on a Switch, Steam, Epic, Mac, Linux, and Playstation.
Yes, it loses a core identity of being “Team Xbox” from the old console wars. But this is the best move for them.
At some point, Playstation will want to do the same. They already gave in on the PS exclusive games, when they know the games will sell on PC if they actually list it there. And now they’re making more money.
Spencer is leading the brand for a better position in 5 years, not trying to sell a $500 box under your TV. As an Xbox gamer, I think he’s done pretty well. I’m anticipating a better cloud offering and for as much as I want the next best game, I still have years and years of games to play on Game Pass.
Exclusives suck. Gaming is a shell of what it once was besides the rare triumph like Elden Ring, etc.
To me it seems the future of Xbox, and where they’re going, is everyday device (TV, iPad, Smartphone) is going to have an Xbox app. Just like Netflix. And that’s where you will play the games. The console will be more of a fire stick type thing, something you plug into the back of a TV.
Now as someone who still buys disc games, I would hate this lol. But it seems like Xbox has talked about this future.
Reason I bought a 360? Halo 3. Reason I bought a PS4? Xbox One.