Phil Spencer can talk about competition positively, too.

Spencer held an opening speech at this year’s DICE Summit, where he admitted that Microsoft needed a reboot when they got a new CEO (Satya Nadella). He thinks that a smoothly functioning internal culture and an effective world-building have a relationship, and these would function as „the bedrock of awesome gameplay.”

„Worldbuilding makes our world understandable and makes stories feel real and grounded. To paraphrase writer Chuck Wendig, good world-building starts with the story, but epic world-building serves the story. It’s language, politics, traditions; it’s faith, it’s laws, it’s customs; it’s race and ethnicity; it’s gender, it’s relationships; it’s the rules of magic; it is lore. In short, it is everything that makes up society,” Spencer said, who seems to have compared the subject to Harry Potter. Okay Phil, let’s move on.

He mentioned several games that raise important questions about the real world around us: Candleman, Life is Strange, What Remains of Edith Finch, and The Last of Us. „Every single time we upend a stereotype in a game, we beg the question, ‘Why can’t it be like this in the real world?’ For us to do our best work, we need our work environment to function well. If the core mechanics of our team and our own internal cultures are broken, everything stumbles. The flipside is when the core mechanics of your team work and the team accomplishes great things. This is our aspiration,” the head of Xbox added.

The speech starts at around nine minutes in the video below. The Xbox titles do need a revamp when it comes to the story, don’t they?

Source: PCGamer