The Xbox boss, while confident in the future of the brand, has once again spoken about the need for Microsoft to have more gamers (or consumers).
Stephen Totilo interviewed Spencer at the DICE Summit last week and here are some interesting comments from him. He talked about the future of Xbox, but also had some predictions for the gaming industry. He also talked about how the solution to the industry’s negligible growth over the last year is to have more gamers. (But it can’t keep growing; it will hit a ceiling!)
“It sounds corny, but I’ve never been more optimistic about where we are. We’re growing on PC. We’re growing on the cloud. Our game studio is just an amazing creative organization. We’ve got great support from the company. We have to be part of the growth of this industry. I think that’s got to be a real focus. I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of finding new players. If you take consoles as a good example, we’ve found 200 million households worldwide that will play console games. And that number hasn’t really changed in the last five, six years.
We’ve increased the price of games. We went through COVID. We have found ways to get more money per player. I think at some point you reach a ceiling on that, and frankly it can go to some places that are manipulative, which I’m not a big fan of. [We need to find new customers, and you find new customers through new ways of delivering games to players who can’t play those games today, whether it’s devices, whether it’s access, whether it’s the price point of video games,” Spencer said.
The company’s shift in strategy is evidenced by the fact that four of its games are leaving Xbox exclusivity behind. This was announced earlier today, and the first game has already been released on the new platforms. In addition to the older titles, Microsoft is also looking to expand its user base with live service titles (including Sea of Thieves).
Leave a Reply