XboxEra Interviews Phil Spencer

The day after the Developer_Direct, Phil Spencer sat down with the XboxEra Podcast crew to catch up with us and celebrate our 250th Episode. Below is a lightly edited transcript of some of the interview, but I’d obviously recommend watching the full video, which debuted as a part of our live 250th Episode broadcast.

We chat about a variety of things, from the Xbox Developer Direct, Microsoft’s new multiplatform approach and what Phil thinks when the community expresses concerns about Xbox becoming the next Sega. We also discover exactly what Phil got his for his birthday and just how good a game show host he could be if wanted to try a career change!

As always, XboxEra is completely supported by our incredible Patreon Community, and they are the ones that make doing reviews, previews and all our custom content possible. If you love what we do, please consider supporting us directly via Patreon.

On Corporate Sounding Job Titles and Milestones…

Jon: Back on the show for a second time, it’s the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Mr Phil Spencer. How are you doing Phil?

Phil: I’m doing well. I so hate that title of CEO!

Jon: I know it’s like the most corporate sounding thing in the world…

Phil: When I hear somebody say it, I’m like ‘arrgh’! But, it’s great to be on. It’s great to like… 250! Congrats! Like you guys – what an accomplishment. I love your voice in the community. Like it’s just such an important part. What you’ve meant for Xbox obviously over the years. And your consistency in what you do – the way you kind of tune your voice on things. I love it. So congrats on the milestone. It’s a pleasure to be here.

On Developer_Directs and Phil’s Most Anticipated Games…

Jon: So for us, the Developer Direct was yesterday. We’re obviously not airing this for a few weeks for Episode 250, but I mean, that’s an impressive showing you guys just put on. I love that the Developer Direct is January… it’s like, oh, start the year, bang. And we’re off to the races. Were the team pleased with how it all came together?

Phil: Well, I’m gonna start, and I think this was our third year that we’ve done Developer Direct and just it’ll sound self congratulatory, but the team here and how they’ve worked on the format and just the content; like such a great job.

Tina Amini’s team, all of the team that lean in to get that project done, and the partners now we get out of third parties in the show and that allow us in with our cameras and our storytelling in their studios I think is awesome. And then yes, we’re all on pins and needles. Like can we keep it secret? And it’s true, some members of the press might have had a glimpse on Ninja and what was going to come, but I don’t think they knew both and that there was a drop that day. 

And then there were obviously other guesses that were out there… But now the show. I loved it. We all got together as a team and watched it, even though we’ve seen it so many times and it’s just fun. Certain people have seen parts of it, but not the whole thing. So it’s fun; we get into a bigger room here and watch it together, and it’s a nice day for the community. It’s a nice day for the teams. I saw a picture from the platinum team. They all watched it together and it’s just a nice way to for us to kick off the year. And I love that we we’ve made it a tradition now.

Nick: Now I’m lucky enough to have you in my discord, which means I get to see what you’re playing a lot of the time. And I noticed you playing Ninja Gaiden 2 Black – which we’ve all been playing now, thanks to Game Pass. (Do you like that plug?) Now I get the idea of not wanting to pick a favourite child, but from everything we saw at the Dev Direct, what are you looking forward the most to playing?

Phil: Well, again, this will sound a little bit like an ad, but the nice thing is there’s some pacing to it, right? And when the games launch, so you can play them all, you actually don’t need [to choose]. And the first one, which even wasn’t in the direct would be Avowed. I’m really looking forward to it; I’m a big RPG player. I love fantasy RPGs. It’ll be fun to get Obsidian, just fantastic, but every game, everyone in there has a story for me, so I’ll quickly go through.

For me, Ninja was one that early on I wanted us to bring back and flying out a few times to Koei, to Team Ninja and even the platinum to try to bring that partnership together took years. And we’ve been working on it for a very long time, and consequently it’s shipping in 2025 on Ninja 4, which is cool to see, but that was like just the result of a lot of work. But Doom has such a place for me in my gaming history. And then the moment where the whole ID team is in their theatre there and they announce their date together like that’s just one of those moments where somebody gets to work with all of our teams here, just kind of lights you up inside.

But I’ll say compulsion, you know, I love those guys. They’re early on in their journey with like their third real big game contrast. We happy few and you can see the evolution of them as a studio and their capabilities. I love their world building. And then, you know, Exhibition 33 – what a fantastic looking game. So I see how I didn’t actually highlight one, but they’re all kind of special for me for their own reason.

Nick: Yeah, you didn’t answer my question at all, Phil.

(Cue much laughter)

Phil: My intense PR training and care for Xbox came through!

On Seeing The PlayStation Logo during an Xbox show…

Jon: When it comes to the dev direct itself, you know fans have gotten used to – over the last 18 months – of PlayStation announces for games, and you guys didn’t shy away from it this time on your own show. Typically it’s been ‘we will talk about that afterwards, we’ll put a press release out or a blog post’, but you’re just showing the PlayStation logo now.

Is this just hey, this is the band-aid off guys, there’s still going to be different decisions but this is the new era. Get used to the way things are going to be. How would you frame that to the community?

Phil: I think it’s just being honest and transparent about where the games are showing, and we actually even had this discussion last year for the June showcase, and by the time we kind of made our decision, we couldn’t get all of the assets done and it felt weird to have some of them in and some of them out.

But I just want to be transparent with people – for shipping on Nintendo Switch, we’re gonna put that. For shipping on PlayStation, on Steam…People should know the storefronts where they can get our games, but I want people to be able to experience our Xbox community in our games and everything we have to offer, on every screen we can.

And obviously not every screen is equal. Yeah, like there’s certain things we can’t do on the other closed platforms that we can do on open platforms, cloud – it’s different. But games should be the thing that we’re focused on. And the strategy that we have allows us to do big games, while also supporting our native platform from hardware to the platform and services that we have and that’s going to be our approach.

And I know it’s not what everybody else is doing, but I just believe games should be the thing that’s at the forefront. Maybe it’s because of how I’ve grown up in this industry. I came from building games. But I think the games are the things that I see growing in their strength in what we’re doing and it’s because more people can play. So yeah, I’m just trying to be open and transparent with people.

On Cloud Gaming, Gatekeeping, and Platforms…

Jon: There’s a radio host in the UK called James O’Brien and he was on his radio show today – I don’t know if you saw the clip going round on Twitter, but he was talking about how he’s a PS5 guy, but he’s also an old grey beard. And he was like, I wanna play Indiana Jones. So he loaded it up on his Samsung TV and played the entire game through Cloud. I think that’s cool.

Phil: I just have to call it out because my friends at Machine Games and the quality of Indy, it’s a game I’m now going through retail builds and taking my time. I’m in Thailand right now but it’s so good, like so good. It doesn’t really benefit people to gatekeep games. It used to be the fact that the largest thing in our industry were the platforms.

The largest thing now are the games, and I think that’s a good thing for the games industry. That’s what the industry is about, storytellers of all sizes being able to tell their stories through the games that they create. And allowing more people to play. I want Xbox to be the platform that enables that. That’s why I loved at the beginning of the showcase of the Dev Direct. We could put up all that all these games are Xbox Play Anywhere, they’re on cloud.

We’ve obviously done our work: Not only is Cloud part of the Game Pass portfolio, but you’re seeing more games added to the Buy your games and be able to stream your games. Allow people to play games – that’s a good thing, not a bad thing for this industry and especially in an industry that we all see is struggling. Both game costs are growing, so keeping gate like restricting where those games can be played is not helping the games themselves. And I think we should optimise for the best games that we can have in this industry.

On becoming Sega and a concerned community…

Jon: I’ve seen a lot of people repeating something that you said back during the whole Activision Blizzard drama with the FTC. It was about how Sony used the 30% that they make on Xbox published games on their platform to kind of ‘reduce your standing in the market’. But I saw a great point from Sam Tolbert on Windows Central. He’s like, well, what about the 70% that they make? It’s funding more games for all of us to play. Can’t we focus on that?

Phil: It’s maybe not what I was going to say on stand at the time. But yeah, I would love to make all of the money for all of the games that we ship right, like obviously we make more on our own platform. It’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important. But there are people, whether it’s their libraries on a PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there.

And I don’t want to then look at that and say, well, there’s no way that we should be able to build a business there, find fans of our franchises there. I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore. People were all so invested in where our games are.  Let’s just allow more people to play and yes, the 70% that we make on games on other platforms is helpful to us being able to build great portfolios like we showed at the Dev Direct and I hope this will continue to show through the rest of the year.

Jesse: That has been one of the main things that we’ve talked about with our community, where their worry is, oh, will they be the next Sega that just becomes their partner? It’s like, no, the feeling that we always get is that the focus is, the more places you are, the more your platform can still ‘go’. So trying to alleviate worries in our community about the future of Xbox’s platform itself has definitely been a thing for a while.

Phil: I want to show respect to the people who voice their concerns. To me, like I get it. And I would never disrespect anybody who comes to me, concerned. I’ve got a library of games on Xbox console. I want to make sure I’ll continue to be able to play those games. Are we going to still do hardware? Are we going to still get to play the games the way we’ve always played? Am I going to have to rent all my games? Can I still buy games? All that.  

I get it. I get the questions. I think we’ve shown respect for people’s libraries over the generations with back-compat and Play Anywhere, and I want to continue to do that. You can buy every game that’s in Game Pass, we’re not trying to funnel everybody into one business model. Play the games the way you want to play them.

We obviously have to run a good business, so we’ll have our pricing and everything that we do, but I want to make as many options as possible for the games that we have. So they find more and more players. It’s why us embracing Windows and embracing Cloud has allowed us to grow. One of our fastest growing regions for us right now is Asia and it’s not because we’re selling more consoles in Asia, but through cloud and PC, we’re finding more users year over year than in any other place. The fastest kind of platform is Cloud. That’s the thing that’s growing the fastest year over year and those are players like you were talking about, like that radio host. We were never going to catch that person with our console. So let’s find them in a way that works, and it’s better for Indiana Jones. It’s better for Xbox.

On 2025 having too many games…

Nick: Now last time you were on, we sort of had a joke with you about how there’s too many games and you were like, there can never be too many games. Now 2025 has come along and I’m sorry, but there’s now too many games; because there is such a ridiculous volume coming this year just from yourselves alone, forget everything else, third party. Have you guys got like a specific strategy in mind? A road map in terms of genre, variety or anything like that?

Phil: No, it’s such a good topic, you know. Matt Booty and I… talk about Avowed, we talked about this a little bit when we moved it… That between Call of Duty Black Ops, which we thought was just going to be an awesome release with Black Ops 6 and it was…like you didn’t want it to be around that except we broke records with the number of players still continues to do great. We thought Indie was going to be awesome, that was going to be our December game. So it was hard to actually find a time for us and we said, OK, games can always benefit from more time. So that was it.

But it was really about planning the portfolio and I think we’re still working on that. Obviously when we stand up at showcase and show the games, those are the dates that we’re committed to. But when we look forward, we definitely want to make sure that the games have the right amount of room, both from, as you said, like a genre perspective, whether it’s add-on content like a DLC, like a Vessel of Hatred for Diablo 4, Shattered Space for Starfield, or a full game. And it’s nice to be able to have kind of more cards than we’ve ever had to play. And to play them at the right times, but the studios are really the ones that enable that, and they’re just doing really great work right now.

On smaller games and dodging tomatoes…

Jon: We’ve seen teams where these developer groups are splintering off internally and figuring out something on their own and then boom, suddenly you’ve got a (relatively speaking) low risk product from a small team that suddenly does great like Grounded. It’s 12 guys. Do you feel that is a strategy that is going to be pursued more from Xbox? Hellblade 2, that was a more boutique, smaller release. I think South of midnight is a lower priced release at launch. I’m noticing this happening more and more – is this something to facilitate the era that we live in where we’ve got these black hole games that just suck up so much time? Is that a big focus for you?

Phil: Yeah. You know, I said years ago and I kind of got some tomatoes thrown at me about the impact that first party games have in our industry. And it was really this struggle that I saw for the business results. And it’s obviously been huge for single player games like there’s no doubt. But part of our reason for trying to get a subscription going was to allow us to also support games that have a beginning, middle and end. I think that the synergies between ‘I want to play a game’; Indy’s not a small game but like, say Indy. And then when I’ve finished, Avowed’s coming.

I love the event from our Dev Direct – Like all of those were single player games. They were all games that have a beginning, middle and end. It was because I didn’t want to see every game turn into some big service based game because they felt like that’s where the business model has. It’s not easy to do that. Not every story is told in that way. Not every game kind of supports that or creative idea supports that business model. And I love the fact that we can go and when I look at what Double Fine’s working on next, when I think about a team like Compulsion. Right, these aren’t the biggest teams and they don’t want to be massive 1,000 person teams and we want them to be able to do great work. And so I want to create a platform that can support that.

I think it’s an important part of our industry because not every story is going to be 100 hours long and not every medium is going to have some kind of mechanic that has a currency and everything. They just want to tell their story and move. Some of my favourite games going back to like Limbo and stuff, these are these are fantastic games that I want to see continue in our industry.

On Favourite Games and pigs in mud…

Jon: Last time we had you on, we asked you what your favourite game – that hasn’t come out yet – that you’re looking forward to. Last time you answered that State of Decay 3 was really up high on your ‘get excited for’ list, right? We’ve seen a little bit of that now at the showcase. What’s the answer to that question again?

Phil: Of the announced ones?

Jon: Yeah. You don’t have to give us an exclusive reveal…but if you want to…?

Phil: I’ll go back to what I said earlier. Yeah, State of Decay is just one of the franchises I love back from the original one, so that one stays on the board. I do think the work that Double Fine’s doing and how Tim kind of solicits feedback from the team. And the other one, I’ll say because I was recently out at Rare. It’s nice to see the team with Everwild and the progress that they’re making.

Jesse: It’s been a while.

Phil: It has been. And we’ve been able to give those teams time in what they’re doing which is good and still have a portfolio like we have. It’s like a dream that Matt (Booty) and I have had for a long time, so it’s finally good to be there. We can give those teams time. And next week I’m going to be up in Vancouver with the Coalition – and how fun is that? I’m actually playing through Gears again. I have a co-worker and she’s like younger, never played. And I said, well, they’re all Co-op, so let’s go through and we’re on three now. Josh Stein’s in, we’re all playing. Hitman, a friend of mine from Xbox Live. We’re playing together. And those games hold up well, the storytelling…

Jesse: Especially on series X with how good they look. Two and three.

Phil: Oh, so good. So I’ll be up there next week. I’m like a pig in mud when they let me in the doors.

On Flipping the script…

Nick: If I can sneak in, do you by any chance… and feel free to say no… Do you have a question for us? Ask us something, flip the script a little bit?

Phil: (Ponders for a moment) People who talk about video games, like the state of the game industry, press and community and all of that, it’s just in constant evolution. You see it, just like the industry itself. But I’m just curious, like from where you sit. Should we, as people who are someone who consumes content – I’m on YouTube, I’m reading stuff. How should we feel about the state of people like yourselves who get to talk about video games? Should we be worried that that whole space is gonna go away or become corrupted by things? Like people with a real honest voice? And just who want to kind of talk constructively about an industry they love? Is there a path for them?

Nick: I’m the wrong person to answer that because I’m always open to bribery with free games, so I’m the wrong person to answer that. Jon’s probably better.

Jon: That’s true. I’ll sweep in. I think the reason we started XboxEra nearly six years ago now, then last year was the first time at Gamescom that we’d all ever actually met. Which is crazy considering what we’ve done. The support we’ve had, the relationships we now have with publishers across the board – it’s amazing. The one thing that we started with and we’ve stuck to is we’ve refused, and we will not stoop to – is manipulating a consumer’s anger or fear to get money. I think that that’s the biggest problem that the industry faces across the board is this ‘rage bait’ across YouTube, across any website really.

It’s this lowest common denominator, scraping the bottom of the barrel because of the need for clicks, and I think if you’ve got a community that can support you with a good, honest voice and you maintain your own integrity in terms of how you feel about things? You’ll succeed, and I think we’ve proven that that’s the case. There you go. There’s me being poignant to wrap things up.

Phil: Yeah, I love that. No, I love it because it’s something that makes me long for magazine subscriptions, where you subscribe to a magazine and that’s kind of where you guys are, right? And it’s you’re paying on a regular basis for the quality of the dialogue.

But otherwise it’s just too…. what do they call it? Search engine optimization or something like that? And I have friends in the industry. I obviously do something different, but as somebody who’s looking for kind of balanced discussion, not all positive – we should be constructive and talk about things that aren’t working for us as players as well. Sorry to make it a heavy question but it is where my head’s at.

Jon: It’s a good one and I’m glad you asked!

Jesse: It’s the one we think about all the time.

Jon: Yeah, we sit there and read things from across the industry, it’s like what? What is this take? We get the same level of like ‘uh’, which is why we do what we do. But look, we’ve taken up enough of your time and we’re very grateful for you giving it up.

Phil: Congrats again on 250, it’s fantastic. It’s really great and next time we’re in the same place, we’re going to see each other!

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That wraps up the XboxEra interviews Phil Spencer piece! There’s a lot more in the video, so we’d obviously recommend giving it a watch. And as always, if you love what we do, you can support XboxEra directly on Patreon – just head to patreon.com/xboxera.