Ten years ago on March 31, 2014, then-Xbox Game Studios boss Phil Spencer was named Head of Xbox. And he inherited quite a mess. You all know the story; there’s no need to beat the horse corpse for the ten-thousandth time. The brand was in disarray after what can, without hyperbole, be called a pretty disastrous launch of the Xbox One. So how far has Xbox come under Spencer’s tenure? And where’s it going from here? Let’s look back and then look forward.
To his credit, Spencer didn’t waste any time trying to clean up that mess. In May of 2014 he unbundled the Kinect motion controller from the Xbox One, thus instantly lowering the price of the console to $399 and back to price parity with Sony’s PlayStation 4. One year later at E3 2015 he announced Xbox’s extensive backwards compatibility effort to some of the loudest applause I’ve ever heard at an Xbox E3 press conference. It was a much-needed dose of player-first good news for Xbox fans, and it would be a years-long effort that brought hundreds of legacy games forward to present and future Xbox consoles (with many of them later technically improved to boot), but it would not be the last.
The Xbox One generation was nevertheless a rough one for Spencer and the Xbox team, though, primarily because of some significant first-party disappointments during much of that time. Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s online multiplayer was an unmitigated disaster at launch and for a long time after (though to the studio’s credit, 343 Industries eventually got it working brilliantly while also adding Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach into the package). Lionhead weirdly tried to pivot Fable into a 4v1 multiplayer game, and not only did it not work, the game got canceled shortly before release and the studio was shut down. The highly anticipated Scalebound was canceled too. Crackdown 3 was a dud. Halo 5’s campaign couldn’t live up to its fantastic marketing campaign.
But there were some serious bright spots. Sunset Overdrive was a criminally overlooked gem from a studio that had only ever worked with Sony prior to this and, in hindsight, Insomniac’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful Spider-Man series wouldn’t have happened without it. Exclusive-at-launch Cuphead was a breakout indie hit and one of the most visually unique games ever made. Microsoft bought the Gears of War franchise from Epic Games and its new caretakers at The Coalition made two absolutely fantastic sequels to continue the series. The Ori games were both phenomenal.
Hardware was given a welcome refresh under Spencer’s watch too. The Xbox One S was a much smaller, sleeker, and even slightly more powerful version of the console that, as a bonus, had a built-in power supply, meaning that there was no massive power brick like the original Xbox One had. The Xbox One X came along in 2017 and was a true step above the PlayStation 4 Pro in horsepower, able to deliver native 4K gaming while the PS4 Pro frequently faked it. And console prices continued to come down.
Another initiative that launched in 2017 is probably the one that will go at the very top of Spencer’s career resume when it’s all said and done: Xbox Game Pass. It’s fair to say that it has changed gaming as a whole, offering subscribers access to a catalog of hundreds of games each month, including any and every first-party game Microsoft makes. In fact, there’s even a first-party Sony game in it! In just seven years, Xbox Game Pass has swelled to over 34 million monthly subscribers and arguably become the thing you think of first when you think of the Xbox brand.
Of course, you need lots of games to feed a service like Game Pass in order to keep people subscribing each month, and so Spencer set out to fix the first-party game problem in the boldest of ways: by leveraging Microsoft’s massive war chest and buying studio after studio after studio. A ton of talent suddenly came through Microsoft’s door, from the Forza Horizon wizards at Playground Games to the RPG gurus at Obsidian to game design legend Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine Productions.
He also deserves credit for Xbox’s industry leadership in normalizing accessibility features in gaming, winning awards in the process. From the Xbox Adaptive Controller to ASL support baked directly into games, Xbox has walked the walk of Spencer’s talk of bringing gaming to everyone.
As Spencer did what he could to salvage the Xbox One generation, his hardware ambitions got bigger for the first console generation that he’d be heading up from the get-go. The Xbox Series X is a great machine that has plenty of horsepower, looks awesome, and works as whisper-quietly as it does reliably. Meanwhile, Spencer’s strategy of lowering the price of entry for the new console by offering a non-4K version of the Series X in the form of the Series S also seems to have paid off, with Xbox doing better than it ever has.
But Spencer would only get bolder as the Xbox Series era unfolded. Microsoft spent $7.5 billion and bought Bethesda/ZeniMax, which included Todd Howard’s Bethesda Game Studios, Doom developer id Software, Dishonored’s Arkane, and more. And then they spent SIXTY-NINE BILLION DOLLARS to pick up the whole of Activision-Blizzard-King, which includes Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush. The purchase price dwarfs the previous largest video game industry acquisition ever by a factor of five, triggering regulatory challenges in multiple countries before the deal was ultimately approved and finalized. Unfortunately, thanks in part to the pandemic and also to the ever-growing incubation time needed to make AAA games, players still have yet to see a steady flow of first-party games despite all of these larger and smaller acquisitions.
And so I would argue that Phil Spencer’s first decade as the top man at Xbox can be summed up this way: a gamer-first focus on great services like backwards compatibility and Xbox Game Pass that hasn’t quite yet delivered a consistent quantity and quality of first-party games, though the future looks incredibly bright no matter where and how you like to play. As for the next ten years? Personally, I’m incredibly excited, as Spencer has shown that, above all else, he puts players first and he’s not afraid to spend money to build out Xbox Game Studios. Soon there will be a never-ending wave of first-party games in any genre you could ask for, all available as part of your Xbox Game Pass subscription, and you might even be able to play them on the go too. Here’s to the next decade of Xbox.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.