Scalebound suffered a very public cancellation. In the Spencer Era, Lionhead shut down after an ill-fated attempt to turn Fable into a 4v1 multiplayer game, sending a pillar Xbox franchise into a decade-plus-long hibernation from which it has yet to emerge. Still, that steady flow of big blockbuster games continues to be a problem. And he’s got the receipts to show that he’s a hardcore gamer just like the rest of us – something that can’t be said of the heads of the other console makers. He earned his shot at the big chair, and by all accounts (including my own), he’s an incredibly nice person in addition to someone who worked his way up the ranks. And to his credit, he was a key part of that foundational success, working his way up before taking over what is now XGS in 2008. He’s held the job longer than any of his predecessors – the people who built Xbox from the ground up into a major player in the multi-billion-dollar video game industry. So if he’s not the problem, what is? Is he surrounded by “yes men” who are afraid to ever disagree with him? Is Spencer himself too nice to ever fire anyone who’s not getting the job done? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that the buck ultimately stops with Spencer. But it’s still fair to look to leadership and look at their track record as well as what those around them say about them.Īnecdotally, anyone I’ve ever talked to about Phil Spencer has expressed nothing but praise and admiration. Success is measured in a million different ways – many of which the public isn’t privy to. You can’t apply that same binary logic to Spencer, Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty, or anyone else in the world of games. If your favorite team loses year after year, you trade players, sign new ones, and eventually fire the head coach/manager and/or the general manager. Is this Spencer’s fault? That’s difficult to say, but I’d lean towards no, because the fact of the matter is that while video games, like sports, are part of a multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry, winning and losing in the video game business isn’t as plainly black and white as it is in sports. And so much of the groundwork had already been laid: the purchasing of many new first-party studios, the gamer-first Smart Delivery feature, and the aforementioned backwards compatibility and Xbox Game Pass initiatives. It’s not that Xbox hasn’t had anything – it isn’t a zero-sum game, after all – but this generation was supposed to be a fresh start for Microsoft a chance to win back the Xbox 360 customers it lost to Sony and the PS4. Xbox has continually disappointed over the past decade in this most important area of all. Unfortunately, though, Spencer has one notable black mark on his legacy: exclusive blockbuster games.
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