Xbox president Sarah Bond to depart Microsoft. Sharma, hyping Xbox, promises: "we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop."
This sucks. Probably not for Spencer, who I think was likely not pleased to have to eat shit sandwiches like jacking up the price of Game Pass and console hardware these last couple of years. But for the rest of us, he championed consumer-friendly initiatives that I found really valuable. Play Anywhere, Game Pass, Smart Delivery, and backwards compatibility all happened under his watch. He pushed hard on improving the PC experience. He also *played games himself* and understood where a lot of the pain points were.
Armchair CEOs in comments sections across the Internet have given him a hard time for awhile now for various (unjustified, IMO) reasons. But I'll remember him fondly as someone who drove hard to break down the walls of platform exclusivity and made my gaming dollar go further. Big shoes to fill!
Spencer did great things for the business overall. He was gamer first.
He never quite got the studios into a stable position, consistently delivering excellent must-play games. Whether that was his fault or the fault of Microsoft culture generally, we’ll never know.
His single biggest failure was the reduced efficiency of Activision post-acquisition.
One thing we can know — definitely, and without question — is that Nadella deliberately sabotaged Spencer, forcing impossible margins that warped his ability to run the Xbox business.
Now that Spencer has gone, if we take Nadella and the new Xbox CEO at their word, Nadella has given her freedom to spend intelligently where Spencer was denied.
I don't even know if you can pin "fault" for the delivery of Microsoft games on the executive team or the parent company, TBH. One thing I learnt from Jason Schreier's books was how bloody difficult game development actually is, and that there's no such thing as a guaranteed hit or easy development.
The only one I can think that might been suffering directly because of Microsoft was 343 with Halo Infinite. Scuttlebutt says Microsoft's policy of using contractors made that game very painful, but 343 were obviously struggling under the workload as far back as Halo 5 in 2015, a game that shipped with massive sections of its campaign obviously cut out and series staple features completely absent.
Meanwhile, The Coalition - have been working on their new Gears game for what, six years now? Is that giving them space to get to grips with UE5, or what? There was about three years between Gears 4 and 5, for example, so something has obviously changed there.
You absolutely can, not for any specific game, but you can look at performance across twenty or thirty studios in a portfolio and evaluate executive performance based on the positive results or lack thereof.
Which studios get acquired? Which games get greenlighted? Which people are promoted? Which initiatives get pushed? Executives set direction and tone.
Sony is absolutely struggling right now, and that is the legacy of an executive pushing live service over everything else. Failures at WB Games were similarly top-down.
Spencer did not get it done. But unlike the others, that could be a result of Microsoft, not what he personally pushed for.
You know, I was thinking about the example of Sony as I typed my earlier reply thinking it irrelevant to my point, and then not even making that point when I hit reply. Heh.
What I was going to say though, was - what would you have done differently?
Painting a broad brush, the Xbox executive team all said they were going to be relatively hands-off as publishers and give their developers room to cook, and that seems to have been *mostly* the case - give or take a Redfall.
I guess when I look at it from the outside, it's very easy to see what Sony did wrong: they got greedy and bet too much on the assumption that live service was where it was at. But it's not so easy to see a better direction for Xbox after the reputational suicide that was the Xbox One launch. Direction and tone set by Spencer in the wake of his taking the reigns all seemed quite sensible to me, an outside observer.
Honestly, it seems more likely to me that Xbox's woes with (your words) "consistently delivering excellent must-play games" come down to the studios rather than the management. Some big dogs just didn't bark. (Starfield immediately comes to mind.)
The biggest hole I can think of in the Xbox first-party portfolio, is the "cinematic third-person perspective action/RPG game", one that Sony has absolutely saturated since the PS4 days with the likes of Uncharted, Last Of Us, Spider-Man, Ghost of T/Y, God Of War, Horizon, etc. Fable is about to step into that gap on its lonesome but gee it's taken XGS a long time to get there.
I feel bad for Sarah. You could feel she was being prepared to take the reigns. Getting hijacked by someone like Sharma which first written text reads like AI slop was too much.
What affected the brand was not the X-Box product itself but the brand which was constantly being repositioned around different product priorities; which in turn disconnected itself from the core consumer. Many years ago, I sat with someone at Citicorp who had been part of the team that had pioneered the concept of cross-promotions with credit cards. You would get your bill monthly and within it there would be all sorts of promotions for associated products the bank was offering.
The credit card was not the core business for the bank; it never was. It was all the other things people at the bank was trying to sell you and lock you within the eco-system. The credit card service was great; it was revolutionary even and once people were locked in; it was game, set and match. Then everyone did it, offered better services and offerings and the card business lost its focus. In a lot of regions they pulled out, sold the credit card debt to local banks and exited out.
Nothing in Microsoft's statements on Phil Spencer's departure says "we're bringing out a new console" and more words are spent underlining the breaking of "limits" and "expansion" -- perfect opportunity, missed.
This sucks. Probably not for Spencer, who I think was likely not pleased to have to eat shit sandwiches like jacking up the price of Game Pass and console hardware these last couple of years. But for the rest of us, he championed consumer-friendly initiatives that I found really valuable. Play Anywhere, Game Pass, Smart Delivery, and backwards compatibility all happened under his watch. He pushed hard on improving the PC experience. He also *played games himself* and understood where a lot of the pain points were.
Armchair CEOs in comments sections across the Internet have given him a hard time for awhile now for various (unjustified, IMO) reasons. But I'll remember him fondly as someone who drove hard to break down the walls of platform exclusivity and made my gaming dollar go further. Big shoes to fill!
Spencer did great things for the business overall. He was gamer first.
He never quite got the studios into a stable position, consistently delivering excellent must-play games. Whether that was his fault or the fault of Microsoft culture generally, we’ll never know.
His single biggest failure was the reduced efficiency of Activision post-acquisition.
One thing we can know — definitely, and without question — is that Nadella deliberately sabotaged Spencer, forcing impossible margins that warped his ability to run the Xbox business.
Now that Spencer has gone, if we take Nadella and the new Xbox CEO at their word, Nadella has given her freedom to spend intelligently where Spencer was denied.
The lingering question is “Why?” What changed?
I don't even know if you can pin "fault" for the delivery of Microsoft games on the executive team or the parent company, TBH. One thing I learnt from Jason Schreier's books was how bloody difficult game development actually is, and that there's no such thing as a guaranteed hit or easy development.
The only one I can think that might been suffering directly because of Microsoft was 343 with Halo Infinite. Scuttlebutt says Microsoft's policy of using contractors made that game very painful, but 343 were obviously struggling under the workload as far back as Halo 5 in 2015, a game that shipped with massive sections of its campaign obviously cut out and series staple features completely absent.
Meanwhile, The Coalition - have been working on their new Gears game for what, six years now? Is that giving them space to get to grips with UE5, or what? There was about three years between Gears 4 and 5, for example, so something has obviously changed there.
You absolutely can, not for any specific game, but you can look at performance across twenty or thirty studios in a portfolio and evaluate executive performance based on the positive results or lack thereof.
Which studios get acquired? Which games get greenlighted? Which people are promoted? Which initiatives get pushed? Executives set direction and tone.
Sony is absolutely struggling right now, and that is the legacy of an executive pushing live service over everything else. Failures at WB Games were similarly top-down.
Spencer did not get it done. But unlike the others, that could be a result of Microsoft, not what he personally pushed for.
You know, I was thinking about the example of Sony as I typed my earlier reply thinking it irrelevant to my point, and then not even making that point when I hit reply. Heh.
What I was going to say though, was - what would you have done differently?
Painting a broad brush, the Xbox executive team all said they were going to be relatively hands-off as publishers and give their developers room to cook, and that seems to have been *mostly* the case - give or take a Redfall.
I guess when I look at it from the outside, it's very easy to see what Sony did wrong: they got greedy and bet too much on the assumption that live service was where it was at. But it's not so easy to see a better direction for Xbox after the reputational suicide that was the Xbox One launch. Direction and tone set by Spencer in the wake of his taking the reigns all seemed quite sensible to me, an outside observer.
Honestly, it seems more likely to me that Xbox's woes with (your words) "consistently delivering excellent must-play games" come down to the studios rather than the management. Some big dogs just didn't bark. (Starfield immediately comes to mind.)
The biggest hole I can think of in the Xbox first-party portfolio, is the "cinematic third-person perspective action/RPG game", one that Sony has absolutely saturated since the PS4 days with the likes of Uncharted, Last Of Us, Spider-Man, Ghost of T/Y, God Of War, Horizon, etc. Fable is about to step into that gap on its lonesome but gee it's taken XGS a long time to get there.
I feel bad for Sarah. You could feel she was being prepared to take the reigns. Getting hijacked by someone like Sharma which first written text reads like AI slop was too much.
Typo at the top. I think you meant “head of Xbox.”
What affected the brand was not the X-Box product itself but the brand which was constantly being repositioned around different product priorities; which in turn disconnected itself from the core consumer. Many years ago, I sat with someone at Citicorp who had been part of the team that had pioneered the concept of cross-promotions with credit cards. You would get your bill monthly and within it there would be all sorts of promotions for associated products the bank was offering.
The credit card was not the core business for the bank; it never was. It was all the other things people at the bank was trying to sell you and lock you within the eco-system. The credit card service was great; it was revolutionary even and once people were locked in; it was game, set and match. Then everyone did it, offered better services and offerings and the card business lost its focus. In a lot of regions they pulled out, sold the credit card debt to local banks and exited out.
Nothing in Microsoft's statements on Phil Spencer's departure says "we're bringing out a new console" and more words are spent underlining the breaking of "limits" and "expansion" -- perfect opportunity, missed.
😮 Oh shit! It’s happening!!