The head of Xbox has stepped on the pedal to the metal – but he better not wipeout in the next corner.

GameReactor interviewed Phil Spencer, who recently went into a big shopping spree. Before that started in 2018, Xbox Game Studios had only eight studios, but with the acquisition of Zenimax (which owns Bethesda), the XGS-family now consists of 23 members, which will still increase further.

„I know some people that, when they’ve looked at the model around Game Pass, have assumed that Game Pass is a better model if there are more Games-as-a-Service games in the subscription. I argue the opposite and believe the opposite. The last thing I want in Game Pass is that there’s one game that everybody is playing forever, that’s not a gaming content subscription, that’s a one-game subscription, that’s WoW, right? So for us, having games in the subscription that have a beginning, middle, and end, and then they go on to play the next game, maybe those are single-player narrative-driven games, I just finished Tell Me Why, an amazing game from DontNod, those games can be really strong for us in the subscription.

In many ways, they’re better than one or two games that are soaking up all the engagement in the subscription. I want a long tail of a lot of games that people are playing, and I think the diversity of online multiplayer versus single-player, we have to support the diversity there, and that’s my goal. If anything I’d like to see more single-player games from our first-party, just because that over time we’ve kind of grown organically to be more multiplayer-driven as an organisation,” Spencer said about the Game Pass, which even he doesn’t call Xbox Game Pass at this point.

He also admitted that in the late Xbox 360 and early Xbox One years, Microsoft underinvested into its studios’ creative efforts, which backfired: „Now, the thing with game production is that it takes a lot of time, so if you underinvest it doesn’t show up next year or even in the next two years. It’s maybe three, four, or five years down the road. I had this feeling or belief that we were underinvesting and I was head of first-party, so I felt it directly. I wanted to invest more, and we weren’t able to. So when I got into this job, I needed to put the business in a good space while getting the support of the company. And then we built a business model that prioritized investing in content knowing that we would have to invest early and wait a while for those investments to pay off,” he said. Remember: back then, Don Mattrick was the boss, not Spencer!

He admitted that there is still a „chink in the armour” in the current line-up of Xbox first-party content in the shape of a lack of E-rated content, or „casual content with a broad appeal.” He wants to deal with this as soon as possible. But what about a possible expansion of the Game Pass to the other platforms?

„I think for us it’s all about priority, and reaching more players, so we went to PC first after Xbox, because there’s just so many players there, globally, that don’t own an Xbox, that we could go reach. We went to mobile next because there are a billion Android phones on the planet. It’s significantly larger than any console player base. We still have iOS to go after, we will come to iOS at some point. We’re still working on some of our technology on PC for larger screens in terms of streaming, and getting to iOS, and I think once we get through that, we look at what the other options are.

There are smart TVs out there, there are Chromebooks out there, there’s FireTV out there, there’s a lot of discussions we would have, we would prioritize it based on where we would find the most of the new players, that we could naturally bring content to. I love the Switch, I love PlayStation, honestly, I think they’ve done an amazing job as being a part of this industry. I’m not sure that those are the next big set of users for us, but we could be open to those discussions,” Spencer added.

So they have a lot of plans.

Source: WCCFTech, Gamesindustry

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