Phil Spencer blames capitalism for being bad at his job
(www.pcgamer.com)
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Does anyone here think Phil Spencer has done a good job as Xbox CEO?
The games media fawns over this guy, but I don't quite understand the hype for him.
It seems like the Xbox brand has a bit of an identity crisis. Microsoft itself has been particularly meddlesome in the development process, they canceled promising titles like Scalebound and let other franchises lay dormant, they're really pushing the ESG garbage, the brand only seems as big as it is because of the mergers that have their own anti competitive implications, Spencer himself wants to ban players across every online platform for "hate speech", and it seems they currently only really have 2 big name franchises; Forza and Halo.
Furthermore, feel free to disagree with me on this, but I'm not sure I see the advantage of Game Pass, especially as someone who doesn't care to play online. You have to pay a base fee on top of the additional cost for individual games. I tend to wait for the price of a game I want to play to come down; and I learn about said games from forums like this one. Wouldn't it make more sense to pay the game's MSRP up front and not just more directly support the developers, but have a working copy you have more ownership of? And not have to worry about looking for a specific game, only to see it delisted because you decided you needed more time to see whether you truly wanted to purchase it or not?
Lately, it seems that Game Pass itself seems to reward bare bones, exploitative live service game design. Look at Forza 2023, which was apparently specifically designed for Game Pass users. The career mode was bare bones at launch, the game itself was riddled with technical issues, its campaign only got new events through this live service model; and the events themselves disappear after a certain time. Forza 2023 also requires an Internet connection to save progress, and seems to require extensive amounts of grinding to make meaningful progression in the game.
If that's the sort of game Game Pass seems to incentivize the creation of, I'm not sure that's a gaming experience for me; especially if other gaming companies try to replicate it.
At that point, a game feels more like a full time job rather than something fun.
Maybe I'm just an out of touch dinosaur. But I don't quite see how Phil Spencer's ideas benefit the customer. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on what Phil Spencer has done for the Xbox brand.
No disagree here, you're spot-on. There is literally no advantage to Game Pass for gamers, since the bigger it becomes as a service, the less ownership you have over the product.
They don't. But again, most people growing up these days are growing up in a post-physical market. Majority of their access to entertainment products comes from digital access. It's all they know. it's why you'll be hard pressed to find a young gamer these days who has an issue with DLC, seasonal passes, battle passes, microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. It's all par the course for them. The next generation of gamers won't even know what non-live service games are, unless they play classics from before 2010.
The guy he replaced -- Don Mattrick -- was the one responsible for pushing Xbox in its current direction, the "all digital future". The thing was, he was ten years too early, and (rightfully so) there was pushback by the market, who recoiled at losing rights and access to products. There were some shills who touted the "you never had any rights to games before", but most people rightfully pointed out that you could access cartridges and discs whenever you wanted without digital rights access.
Gamers abandoning Xbox during that era was Microsoft's wake-up call, and Phil Spencer said everything right at the time to accommodate goodwill from gamers. He walked back a lot of Mattrick's talking points and tried to play nice with Nintendo and Sony; he talked openly about supporting cross-platform play and paid a lot of lip-service to strengthening the Xbox brand through third-party support (something Microsoft lacked for ages).
Spencer, essentially, was a good politician and played his hand well.
But as we're all seeing, he was all talk. Everything Mattrick started with the Xbox One is continuing on full-steam ahead with whatever the current line of Xbox consoles are. Almost all media entertainment now is digital or streaming, so most people don't even protest if a game is unavailable on a physical disc.
Spencer, however, has moved on to the next big phase: programming the next generation with ESG/DEI propaganda.
Microsoft has had a decade to build good games, and have consistently chosen not to. In the face of all the SBI stuff, they have doubled down on ugly female characters and even had an edict slip publicly about ensuring devs keep making ugly females, since they seem intent on not publishing anything aimed at straight White/Asian male gamers.
I would have been curious to see what Spencer could have done had he been designated his role as head of Xbox to actually make good games instead of toeing the corporate line of brainwashing what few Xbox customers they have left. If the console industry was actually competitive instead of pushing regressive Marxist (socio)politics, I'm curious if he could have wrangled in some third-party exclusives to actually publish good games?
I guess in some separate time-line that is playing out and gamers are enjoying (or hating) whatever it is they're producing. But in the Clownworld time-line, we're getting more man-hating nigress afro-lesbians forced into derivative, boring shooters constantly taking the piss out of its core demographic.
I mean even the old guard seems to be routed to some extent and talking about it like it is no problem. Some time we get a small bump of resistance like the Diablo phone game but overall, it seems like the modern man is a convert until the electricity goes out.
You're sadly right.
Do you think he'll succeed at pushing the wokeness?
In my opinion, he's seeing a similar pushback like the one Mattrick saw in 2013. More people are beginning to see DEI/ESG for the predatory scam that it is and really becoming vocal in their opposition to it.
I think the opposition to the wokeness is at an all time high, perhaps even bigger than when Trump was President.
That's a good question.
In the same way that there are protests and pushback against wokeness in record droves, there are also a lot of people who have become complacent with it. For instance, if I bring up Baldur's Gate 3 being woke in any general news/gaming/media channel, the average person will have a conniption and defend the game to the death that it's "not woke" and just a "great game". I was recently watching one video where they were comparing character creators and someone said that Baldur's Gate 3 had one of the best character creators they've played. It left me scratching my head because it's not even in the top 10, and has a ton of severe limitations compared to even older games like Black Desert Online, which, to my knowledge, is still probably the best out there.
All that is to say, while a lot of people are now awake to the DEI/ESG nonsense, and while you're right that opposition to wokeness is at an all-time high (especially with anything coming out of the house of the mouse, or policies from Labour/Democratic politicians) there's also still an unfortunate amount of people still wholly complacent to it all. The normies.
I think if Spencer could land one or two big AAA successes for Xbox that are just decent enough (they don't even have to be good, just decent), and still kept pushing woke nonsense in subsidiary support titles, then yeah, they will succeed in pushing wokeness.
Even now, look at Sony -- almost all their major titles are woke. But Helldivers 2 has made people forget about it for the most part, and Stellar Blade has people convinced that wokeness on PlayStation is mostly dead. It's just two games. Are they enough to convince people to buy the next woke Naughty Dog outing? I guess time will tell.
Jim Ryan was the PlayStation head when the wokeness at that brand was at a peak.
Hiroki Tatoki has taken his place. He's from Japan, so he may very well have a firmer focus on making quality games that entertain everyone- which is exactly what Japanese gamers have been wanting (Japan as a whole does not seem happy with the globalists' push to force them to accept wokeness one bit.)
Quite the contrast from his predecessor, who must have signed most of the decision making over to the California division.
From what you've said about those two games, he may have come in at just the right time.
I'm not holding my breath or anything, but he seems like he's actually trying to get publishers and developers to knock it off with the wokeness.
The disgusting, ignorant way the PlayStation social media team and the U.S. division responded to the aftermath of the 2020 Summer of Love made me wary about buying a PS5.
However, games like Tekken 8 and Elden Ring do look rather tempting, and I heard the wokest personnel like Neil Cuckmann could very well be leaving the industry altogether- or at least have far less influence.
Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but it looks like things might finally be heading in the right direction for the PlayStation brand again.
On the other hand, do you think Phil Spencer is close to scoring that successful game? FH5 was sort of there, but its numbers could very well have just been boosted by Game Pass' existence. And Halo Infinite and FM 2023 seem to have disappointed players so far and are cited as examples of what's wrong with the current Xbox brand.