How the fuck did you even come up this?? "Doesn't mean quality???"
What's sad is how you came to that conclusion in your post. Sheesh!!
When your upper management gives you an objective of reaching "XXX millions gamers by the end of year", you don't go the quality route.
I am actually living the exact same situation in my work, not going to reveal the details of course, but we have a goal that is "reach 5 millions by the end of the year".
I can tell you that when you get such goals, while you were sitting around 100k, you certainly don't think about quality. Instead, you review all the possible means that will attract as many "units" as possible for you to reach the goal. And when everybody's salary raise is going to depend on the success of this goal, you can be sure that nobody will try going in the opposite way.
So obviously, Spencer set as objective to the management below him to reach that "XXX millions of players by the end of the year" (it won't be 7 billion obviously) and the management team will be working towards that goal.
How do you attract all these players in your ecosystem ? Well certainly not by continuing doing what you have always been doing. You have two options :
- either you start making new content that will attract the players (Wii, Kinect)
or
- you buy whatever existing content that has all these players and put it into your ecosystem (Minecraft, PUBG)
So in both cases, I don't see this working well towards what my egoistical self would hope to see in the future coming from Xbox.
I am saying this and I have been a good supporter of Microsoft, and play mainly on Xbox. But they are going to throw their money, again, at stuff like Kinect or Minecraft or PUBG etc... Which is quite sad. They only managed to build 3 very strong IPs since they entered the market : Halo on OG, Forza and Gears on 360, and pretty much nothing on One (maybe Ori ?). I would like to see them releasing great games again and again and build strong IPs, rather than chasing stuff hoping that it will work on the long term.
Just my point of view of course.