[jrmg]

I never understood the esteem Phil Spencer was held in, seemingly both by fans and industry insiders. I never understood Phil’s strategy.

Buy a plethora of studios. Pay an order of magnitude over the odds for the big ones - just to be sure you get them! ‘Rescue’ smaller ones of questionable financial value - as part of Xbox they’d somehow be successful enough to justify the price paid. Heavily manage the studio heads - but, uh, also give them total creative freedom - and allow them to make niche games. Sell hardware at a loss - but also make the games available on all platforms. Don’t allow any software that takes advantage of your most powerful hardware, because it also has to run on the other, less powerful console you are also selling. Also, the future is streaming! But, uh, maybe not!

Not just the strategy, but almost every aspect of the ‘strategy’, was incoherent - as current management is very close to outright saying.

[Schnitz]

> I never understood the esteem Phil Spencer was held in

He headed things during the Xbox 360 era, which was a golden era of gaming, one of the best console generations and also peak Xbox.

Just look at this video to get an idea of how high the density of great games was at that time: https://youtu.be/w5u8jyPIrIY?is=NsTee0620BmmVbcB

[jrmg]

I’ll admit to being ‘out of gaming’ for that era (I’m a pandemic gaming-returner), but I wasn’t aware of that. Was his reach bigger than his official title?

Wikipedia doesn’t show him in an ‘overall leader’ role until 2014, a year into the relatively disastrous Xbox One era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spencer_(business_executi...

[Schnitz]

He was very visible, giving interviews to the mainstream press and presenting games on stage at E3 as early as 2010. I'd also argue that while he wasn't the top dog of all things Xbox from 2009 to 2013, Head of Microsoft Studios is still a pretty big deal and arguably the quality of games matters more than the hardware. Also keep in mind that he rolled back a lot of the - from the perspective of the core gaming audience - disastrous Xbox One launch (TV focus, Kinect bundle) after taking over. There's an argument to be made that Xbox the console wouldn't have survived this long without him. That said, he caught a lot more flak in recent years and IMHO deservedly so.

[davidgnz]

> Buy a plethora of studios

IIRC Xbox had been criticized for quite a while at that point for having very few exclusive/first-party games worth buying an Xbox for. I always assumed this move was to try and fix that problem.

[jrmg]

The (an?) incoherency with that is that this was happening at the same time as the ‘everything’s an Xbox’ strategy that saw them produce games for other platforms too.

[pjmlp]

That was a side effect from ABK acquisition, they bought studios that traditionally were cross platform, the year long acquisition discussion always promised not to touch them in that regard.

So you end up with this schizophrenic way that XBox became more of a publisher than a console brand, with a leadership used to cross platform (Sarah Bond), thus ‘everything’s an Xbox’ pivot for the "curve must always go up".

[khurs]

Concerns about competition regulators stopping the acquisition? so they said for next x years we guarantee won't be exclusive?

[dd8601fn]

Having to promise to make titles available on Playstation to satisfy regulators kinda blows that strategy up.

[AlexandrB]

> Buy a plethora of studios.

To be fair to Phil Spencer, this was the strategy across the industry right after COVID. Remember the shopping spree Embracer Group went on between 2020 and 2022? I think we were in an e-sports & live service bubble that has now popped.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, but most of them weren't platform owners, thus did not had the issue of exclusives vs cross-platform.

[khurs]

Wasn't it a strategy to have exclusives on xBox and take games away from Playstation?

[pie_flavor]

Which games of their output were Xbox exclusive? They were basically transitioning into a publishing house with no real hardware impact. In fact what did Phil in finally was trying to sabotage the hardware brand itself with the 'This is an Xbox' campaign. I said out loud when I saw the first ad, 'Phil will get shitcanned for this.'