The past couple of weeks have been rough for Xbox and their community. The CMA blocked Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Redfall has launched to an overwhelmingly negative reception due to the game’s poor state at launch with criticism of the game’s many technical issues and overall game design. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer talked about these things and more in a new interview.
The first topic of conversation was about the CMA’s decision to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. “We’ll be appealing that. That’s our plan,” Spencer said. “We continue to work with the European union. We’ll continue to work with the FTC. I think there are like 14 jurisdictions all up we’re working on approval. I think we have 9 approvals so far.”
The CMA’s decision came down to Xbox’s position in the could gaming market. The CMA believes that the acquisition would “alter the future of the fast-growing cloud gaming market, leading to reduced innovation and less choice for UK gamers over the years to come.”
“The CMA decision was disappointing. I’ve been talking to that group for coming up on a year,” Spencer said. “They’ve defined a market of cloud gaming in my mind doesn’t really exist yet today but they have a point of view that maybe we have a lead in a market that is just forming and that this content could somehow prohibit others from competing in that market, but we’ll appeal. We stay on it, the company remains very very committed. Activision Blizzard King is not our strategy but it is an accelerant for our strategy so we’re still heads down and working towards regulatory.”
Talking about Redfall and its poor launch, Spencer puts the blame on himself. “There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community,” Spencer said. “I’ve been a part of it for a long time. I obviously work on Xbox, I’m head of the business, I have a lot of friends and get a lot of feedback, and just to kind of watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I’m disappointed, I’m upset with myself.”
Spencer says that the game’s poor reception came down to the development team not hitting its goals. “Learning about the quality – and I know there are bugs, I’ve seen them in Redfall – when I look at the crash rates with the game, because we get all the telemetry for everything – it’s not out of proportion for a game that has just launched, it’s kind of in the pocket of what we’d expect. That’s not to deny any of the animation, streaming of texture bugs, or AI bugs – we will go and work on those. But when I look at the review scores of this game it’s [about] did we have enough creative differentiation in our core idea and did we realise that creative ambition? I’m a huge supporter of Arkane Austin: their track record is awesome, I love a lot of the great games that they’ve built. This is one where the team didn’t hit their own internal goals.”
Spencer detailed their philosophy on delays and explained why, in his mind, it wouldn’t have fixed anything. “There are quality issues and we’re working on those, but a fundamental piece of feedback I get [from Redfall reviews] is that the game isn’t realizing the creative vision that it had for its players. That doesn’t feel like a, ‘hey, just delay it’, that feels like the game had a goal to do one thing and when players are actually playing they’re not feeling that,” he said.
“When a game needs to be delayed, like what we did with Starfield, Halo and Redfall, because the production timeline is saying, ‘we have this vision, and our production timeline don’t get us to the completion of that vision’, we do delay games. I think it’s maybe a bit simplistic to say, ‘hey, maybe if you just delayed it three months, the core creative of the game would’ve delivered on something than what it was’. So I look at them in different camps. If there’s a production timeline issue, we’ve been open to delaying. If we just have more bugs than we should have at the end of a game, we’re open to delaying. At some point we do need to have a creative vision and put the game out and reviewers and players will tell us what they think.”
Spencer also noted that they and Arkane Austin will continue to support the game similar to what Rare did with Sea of Thieves. “In terms of our commitment to the game… absolutely, the team at Arkane is taking the near-term feedback. We’re still working on the 60fps update. We have a good timeline for that… and we’re going to continue to work [on] the game. We’ve shown a commitment to games like Sea of Thieves and Grounded, to continue to go and build games.”
“But I also know that these games are $70, and I’m going to take full responsibility for launching a game that needs to be great,” Spencer said. “We let a lot of people down this week with the launch of the game, but we will continue to strive on. You have to – that’s what creativity is about.”
Spencer also shed some light on the thought process going into the upcoming Xbox Games Showcase. During the last Showcase, Xbox showed the 12-month plan leading into 2023 and all of the games that were supposed to come out. Parris Lilly of Kinda Funny brought that up and asked: “Last year, during the Showcase, you had the 12-month plan“, Lilly said. “You didn’t necessarily deliver on all the games…”
“No, we didn’t deliver,” Spencer interrupted. “There’s no ‘necessarily’. We didn’t deliver.”
Speaking on this year’s showcase, Spencer said “I’m not going to try to oversell Showcase here, because if I was on the other side watching this it’s like, ‘hey, after Redfall, I’m going to put my hands on the controller and that’s what it’s going to take to prove it to me.’ But that’s not what Showcase is, so I’m very enthusiastic about Showcase. We’re going to announce some things that people haven’t seen, some new games, [and] we’re going to give updates to some of the things that were on your list.”
Spencer then went to talk about the future. “The other thing that gets me really excited is when I look forward over the next quarters – which has always been my focus, how do we get a big game out every quarter, at quality – that things are lining up finally after some of the slowdown though Covid. I’m tired of talking about that, but I can now see that we’ve got games coming every quarter that I think will surprise and delight our customers.”
“We still have to deliver on the creative, we still have to deliver on the technical, not every game we ship is for everybody, we know that. I’m not trying to build the one game to rule them all.
“We will have different creative takes, and we have a very diverse portfolio, when you think about the stuff that Microsoft Game Studios builds, but I like that.
“I think for what we’re trying to do as Xbox, which isn’t to mimic any of the other platforms out there, [is to] create our own brand and identify the diversity of what we build, which hopefully will end up being a strength.
“But 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.”
The Xbox Games Showcase is set for June 11, 2023, at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 6 pm BST / 7 pm CET. It will be directly followed by Starfield Direct.