Phil Spencer Responds As Industry Legends Celebrate His Xbox Career

He ran the company into the ground. There is no praise left for him.. He gave exclusives away while getting nothing in return. Game pass price is out of hand, Xbox tech is janky af and every "big" release has been awful.

Valve should offer Phil a job.. or maybe Nintendo.

@GamerScore200K The damage was done before Phil came in Don mattick was the dude that screwed up the Xbox one gen forcing kinect to be bundled with the console and that whole DRM crap at E3 Phil fixed a lot of things he inherited but the damage was already done.

Going to grab my popcorn for this one as the armchair executives fill the comments section...

@GamerScore200K I’m 99% sure all of those things you mentioned were coming from above and Phil had no say in it (or if he did, they didn’t listen). I really think Phil retired because he wasn’t happy with the way management was handling Xbox.

And every big release has been “awful”? Sure, Forza Horizon 5 was so awful that it was topping PlayStation charts even though it was five years old at that point. Indiana Jones was so awful it got quite a few GoTY nominations. Doom: The Dark Ages, Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2 and plenty of other games that got 80+ MC scores.

He retired and his replacement resigned, why?

Phil has earned his place among the legends of the industry.

When he took over, the division was in crisis after the failure of the Xbox One. He convinced Microsoft to keep investing in Xbox at a time when the company was considering drastically reducing its role.

He secured Xbox’s independence within Microsoft. Spencer managed to turn it into a major branch of the company — today even more important internally than Windows.

He launched backward compatibility.

He created and popularized Xbox Game Pass, a service that gave many studios stable funding and gave players access to a large game library.

He invested in cloud gaming, which allowed Xbox to reach regions where consoles are too expensive or heavily taxed.

Thanks to him, Xbox became the number one video game publisher.

Phil Spencer rebuilt Xbox, stabilized it, modernized it, and turned it into a strategic pillar for Microsoft — even if not everything was perfect.

I do criticize him for being more on the developers’ side than the players’ side. His vision of full multiplatform and zero exclusives is, in my opinion, too radical and somewhat utopian. There’s a middle ground to be found.

I think this change comes at the right time for Xbox, just before a major revolution in the industry with the next Xbox console. Contrary to what some people say, she mainly has experience in growing and modernizing products, and in marketing / communication/social media. And that’s exactly what Xbox needs: clearer communication, a clearer strategy, and a leadership team that listens more to players.