Support NeoGAF

[midnightAI]

That's just a puff piece. Amazing that Ryan McCaffrey is still writing shit like this......

"Soon there will be a never-ending wave of first-party games in any genre you could ask for......"

That's what happens when a company sends you loads of free shit, you keep them as happy as possible so they send you more free shit in the future. (Ryan will get all expenses paid trips to all the XBox conferences etc. also, they make him feel special so his allegiance is strong, no different to a YouTube like Colt)

 

[DragonNCM]

Phil Spencer is like Elon Musk of video games. Extremely successful at convincing investors to give him money to burn. Extremely successful at bulding a cult of personality with millions of retarded followers. Says a lot of shit while not achieving anything. Always promises, never delivers.

Elon Musk my friend launching satellites, cargo, crew for US, soon his rocket will send people to moon, have best electric car in the world, innovating technology to help people with dysfunctionality....& no you can't compare him with Phil Spencer.

 

[FullMetalx117]

Man never really got close to the sun and still managed to burn it all down.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Phil Spencer is like Elon Musk of video games. Extremely successful at convincing investors to give him money to burn. Extremely successful at bulding a cult of personality with millions of retarded followers. Says a lot of shit while not achieving anything. Always promises, never delivers.

You have to be seriously mentally retarded to think Elon Musk has "not achieved anything"

 

[Fox Mulder]

I hope ign at least got some of those Xbox toasters for this puff piece.

Xbox is probably worse off now than any generation. They still struggle with first party games after buying tons of studios and fans waiting until next year for like a decade. They killed any reason to buy their console with day one PC releases. Forza Motorsport/Gears/Halo were pillar franchises that are greatly diminished today.

 

[Jibran#one]

10 years ago When Phil came he promised great games and told us next year is the Xbox year still waiting on that.
My beard has gone from black to white and still no 10/10 must buy system seller game on Xbox

 

[nordique]

Xbox One S
Xbox One X
Xbox Series S
Xbox Series X
Subscriptions
Bought a bunch of studios
barely any games

 

[Nvzman]

He shouldnt be getting credit for Insomniac's Sunset Overdrive. That was Don's doing. Even Titanfall 1 was Don. What Phil did was that he bought lifetime exclusivity when he took over then spent god knows how much for Tomb Raider exclusivity instead of you know teaming up respawn and insomniac again. You know the studios who had two different dev teams and couldve built him a franchise.

He cancelled Scalebound, Fable, Coalitions new IP when Xbox needed them the most. While wasting $2.5 billion on a needless Minecraft purchase.

Those decisions were likely responsible for Xbox sales completely dropping off a cliff after a somewhat strong first three years. Things were not as dire as IGN is making them out to be. At least when it came to sales. XS is actually trailing the X1 in sales. When people see cancellations instead of investments, why would they continue to make the investment in your console? no wonder the X1X didnt move the needle despite being a great console.

Had he invested in Ryse 2, Scalebound, Fable, Coalition's new IP and Sunset Overdrive 2 instead of Minecraft in those crucial early years, things might not be this bad today.

I don't give a fuck what anyone says.
You play video game console for VIDEO GAMES. And that does mean exclusives too.
Did people buy the Xbox in 2001 for Xbox Live coming up or ripping CDs to the HDD? Fuck no, they bought it for HALO. They paid for Xbox Live for HALO 2. People bought 360s for Gears of War, Halo 3, Forza, Saints Row, Dead Rising, etc
These companies have completely lost the narrative for what makes consoles amazing, which is when a dev team can solely focus on one platform's strengths and deliver an experience not possible if it was multiplatform (or at least significantly more focused optimization wise). Phil Spencer bringing things like backwards compatibility was excellent, but other than that he's done nothing but ignore the fact that people will not pay for your shit if you don't have games worth playing. The project management is beyond terrible too.
Imo the only way Xbox saves themselves at this point (which won't happen probably) is to use this multiplatform approach to get more people to play Xbox titles, give them a "taste" per say, and then work on some actual quality games to release alongside a new Xbox console, take Sony by surprise like the 360 did. That's the only way I don't see the Xbox ship going completely third-party. Its sad too because they are far too incompetent and unfocused to pull off something like that, an absolute shadow of what Xbox used to be.

 

[Romulus]

Hate to say it, but this has been the worst years for Xbox. I was all in on Xbox until around 2012-14.
I was never a big Sony fan, but by default it felt like the only option because Xbox games kept getting worse.
I'll never understand how they could look at the most explosive growth in their history (2004-2009) and not want to replicate that. No they veered off course with bizarre shit like TV and Kinect while sony continued to build on their franchises.

 

[Frwrd]

This has been the best japanese support for Xbox probably ever

Biggest =/= “Best”

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

I don't give a fuck what anyone says.
You play video game console for VIDEO GAMES. And that does mean exclusives too.
Did people buy the Xbox in 2001 for Xbox Live coming up or ripping CDs to the HDD? Fuck no, they bought it for HALO. They paid for Xbox Live for HALO 2. People bought 360s for Gears of War, Halo 3, Forza, Saints Row, Dead Rising, etc
These companies have completely lost the narrative for what makes consoles amazing, which is when a dev team can solely focus on one platform's strengths and deliver an experience not possible if it was multiplatform (or at least significantly more focused optimization wise). Phil Spencer bringing things like backwards compatibility was excellent, but other than that he's done nothing but ignore the fact that people will not pay for your shit if you don't have games worth playing. The project management is beyond terrible too.
Imo the only way Xbox saves themselves at this point (which won't happen probably) is to use this multiplatform approach to get more people to play Xbox titles, give them a "taste" per say, and then work on some actual quality games to release alongside a new Xbox console, take Sony by surprise like the 360 did. That's the only way I don't see the Xbox ship going completely third-party. Its sad too because they are far too incompetent and unfocused to pull off something like that, an absolute shadow of what Xbox used to be.

Great comment. Regarding BC, I've been saying how awful it is that Xbox shut down the BC program. That's a microcosm for what's wrong with Xbox. There are so many Xbox One exclusives that STILL don't have 60 fps and are stuck at 720p-900p! Once they shifted focus to GP and forgot about BC I knew they lost the plot.

What's weird is how few gamers seem to even care that BC program was shut down. Console still has a long way to go compared to PC on BC and the Series X was the console that had the tech to bridge that gap.

 

[RickMasters]

I wants heard somebody describe him as the type that failed their way to the top. Based on his leadership of Xbox…… I’m inclined to agree.



They guys go no balls. Never talks straight. And MS for all those resources seem to want to do everything except what makes consoles great.


Honestly I’d be ok with them just putting Xbox out of its misery. Hey have given up. So I too must give up on them.


My next Xbox will probably be my last. And I’m assuming at this point it’s gonna run steam on it too.


Here is my impression of MS: “ you don’t need to buy out consoles, you don’t need to buy out games, you don’t need to buy gamepass…. Matter of fact we are not even sure what we are doing here…. Um….. we want money?”



I bet even Sony gets confused by Phils stupidity sometimes.

 

[Gudji]

To another decade as head of Xbox.

 

[The Pleasure]

Whopper Whopper Whopper Whooper
Redfall, Starfield, Super Whopper
Okay games with gamepass add ons
You play these games

At Microsoft, gamepass all day
YOU RULE!

 

[RickMasters]

"People" have been saying he has been saving Xbox from year one as well. "People" say a lot of things.

And MS often prove them right. We are on the verge of seeing them become a full blown 3P publisher. I don’t see a future for Xbox beyond being a legacy hardware for those of us with huge Xbox digital libraries. I’m already slowly starting to make steam my main platform going forward, with gamepass for MS and indies and some AAAs that turns up on GPU.



Just give me a steam installer on the same Xbox… then make the next Xbox some sort of compact console form factor M-ATX PC type of box. I’ll build mine out of cool ASUS ROG or gigabyte autos parts. I’m done buying fixed hardware consoles and being tied to one service. Let them all compete for my money on one box instead of me buying multiple boxes.

 

[RickMasters]

To another decade as head of Xbox.

I wouldn’t count on it…..

 

[digoutyoursoul]

To another decade as head of Xbox.

 

[diffusionx]

the biggest successes of MS the past 10 years has been Age of Empires and Forza Horizon. Not even Forza as the last Forza Motorsport sucks. Halo is irrelevant. Nobody cares about Gears. Their acquisitions have borne very little fruit. Their big games take forever to come out and end up disappointing and Phil seems surprised at the reaction, which indicates he doesn't really know what is going on in his own shop.

It's bad. I give him credit for trying something new but it hasn't worked. All they have done is flex their financial muscle but haven't built a sustainable business. They spent $70 billion to acquire Call of Duty and who can say they can sustain that after what they've done? What do they do if that franchise follows the Halo route?

 

[Dr. Suchong]

To another decade as head of Xbox.

One can only hope....

 

[DaGwaphics]

Xbox One S
Xbox One X
Xbox Series S
Xbox Series X
Subscriptions
Bought a bunch of studios
barely any games

They should have those regularly now. It's not like dev time hasn't increased for everybody.

 

[adamsapple]

They should have those regularly now. It's not like dev time hasn't increased for everybody.

It's a dumb disingenuous fanboy-perpetuated narrative which will probably only end with the heat-death of the universe

2023 had 4 new first party games, 4~5 remasters/re-releases of older games.
2024 has at least 4 (5 counting the annual CoD) first party releases currently scheduled.

 

[simpatico]

He fixed the X-Bone as best you could. Xbox Series has still been a disaster. Hardware good, but they just keep committing unforced errors on the software front. Starfield being a turd was incredibly unlucky. Bethesda had a great trackrecord and it seemed like a safe money bet. They should have cut ties with 343 years ago and shrunk the scope of Halo back to original trilogy size. They spent all this money on developers and they aren't leveraging any of them. The first party Doom or Quake announcement should have happened a year ago. Put Bethesda on crunch to get TES out the door. Make them let Obsidian do a Fallout game. I mean the money is on the fucking table for these people. What if the next COD only ran at 30fps on the playstation? Options abound.

 

[Bumblebeetuna]

To another decade as head of Xbox.

I think he retires before too long and Bond, Sarah Bond replaces him.

 

[Melfice7]

10 years of lies, broken promises and mismanagement. heres to another 10

 

[sendit]

Phil brought us The Initiative:


They released games like….

 

[Klosshufvud]

Phil brought us The Initiative:


They released games like….

Damn, five years ago. I still remember when shills made a big deal out of this studio. How it would rival Sony's best. Yet another MS wet fart, amidst countless others.

 

[Pedro Motta]

Well, he's fatter now.

 

[Negotiator101]

Here's to another 10 years!

 

[kensama]

Phil brought us The Initiative:


They released games like….

And that's without counting the departures that have occurred since the creation of the studio.

Report: Perfect Dark studio The Initiative sees wave of staff departures

Xbox studio The Initiative has lost approximately half of its main development team, including a handful of senior empl…

www.gamesindustry.biz

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

This what I'm looking forward, the moment where there is no spin/damage control anymore.

and a lot of people are not falling for Phil's sweet words anymore.

 

[ZehDon]

Ten years across two console generations is enough runway for anyone, in my opinion. I'll always hold Spencer in high regard because, frankly, Xbox exists because he fought for it. But, in 2018, Xbox was given an allowance from Pappa Microsoft and they started gobbling up studios to improve their first party output as part of Spencer's "plan". After six years, and an entirely new console, said plan has delivered... so few bangers I can count them on one hand - and I'm generously counting smaller titles like Gears Tactics and Hi-Fi Rush as bangers. Spencer's had enough time to deliver something, and I'm just not seeing a return on investment here. Halo Infinite, Redfall, Starfield; either Xbox just keeps tripping over, or, management can't tell a good game from a bad one. I don't know which one is worse, to be honest. At least he gutted 343i - that'd be a "career moment" for any Halo fan.