In an interview, the Xbox chief touched on a number of topics, including Xbox Game Pass and a long-announced game.

For example, in an interview with the Xbox Era podcast, he talked about what he told the FTC (the US Federal Trade Commission) in 2023: if an Xbox game was sold on the PlayStation Store every time, he didn’t like the fact that Sony was working with a 30% profit margin. He now prefers to focus on the 70% rate, because he believes that it is no longer sustainable for a company to transfer PlayStation 5 games to Xbox, but rather to sell games directly to them.

“It’s maybe not what I was going to say on the stand at the time, but yeah, I would love to make all the money on all the games we ship right now. Obviously we make more on our own platform, that’s one of the reasons it’s important to invest in our own platform. But there are people – whether it’s because their libraries are on PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s because they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there – and I don’t want to look at that and say, “Well, there’s no way 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. We’re 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 helps us build great portfolios, as we showed at Developer Direct, and I hope that continues to show through the rest of the year,” Spencer said.

He then went on to explain why the Xbox Developer Direct shows the logos of competing platforms instead of just its own (a trend also followed by Nintendo and Sony): “I just want to be transparent with people. If we’re shipping on Nintendo Switch, we’re going to show that, if we’re shipping on PlayStation, if we’re on Steam, people should know the storefronts where they can get our games. I want people to be able to experience our Xbox community and our games and everything we have to offer on every screen we can, and obviously not every screen is the same. There are certain things that we can’t do on the other closed platforms that we can do on open platforms, clouds, but games should be the thing that we focus on.

This strategy that we have allows us to do big games while supporting our native platform from the hardware to the platform to the 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 think that games should be the thing that’s at the forefront. Maybe it’s because I grew up in this industry, I came up making games, but I think games are the things that I see growing in strength because of what we’re doing, and it’s because more people can play. So yeah, just trying to be open and transparent with people,” Spencer added.

Microsoft’s focus on Xbox Game Pass over the past few years may raise questions about whether it’s taking ownership of games away from the public in order to drive the community toward subscriptions: “I think we’ve shown respect for people’s libraries over the generations with back-compatibility and Play Anywhere, and I want to continue to do that. You can buy any game that’s in Game Pass, we’re not trying to force everyone 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 give as many options as possible for the games that we have.

That’s why embracing Windows and embracing the 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, it’s because through Cloud and PC we’re finding more users year after year than any other place. The fastest kind of platform is cloud. That’s what’s growing the fastest year over year, and those are players like you were talking about, like that radio guy. We were never going to catch that person on our console. So let’s find them in a way that works and it’s better for Indiana Jones. It’s better for Xbox,” Spencer replied.

Finally, he also answered a question about which games in development he is most looking forward to: “State of Decay is just one of the franchises that I love from the original, so that one stays on the board. I think the work that Double Fine is doing and the way Tim is getting feedback from the team. And the other one, I’m saying this because I was at Rare recently. It’s nice to see the team with Everwild and the progress they’re making. It has been a while. And we’ve been able to give those teams time to do what they’re doing, which is good, and still have a portfolio like we do. It’s like a dream that Matt Booty and I have had for a long time, so it’s good to finally be there. We can give these teams time,” said the Xbox boss.

So Everwild is still in the works…

Source: VGC,