Phil Spencer blames capitalism for being bad at his job
(www.pcgamer.com)
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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.
That's an extremely cogent point about Tatoki taking over. I haven't been following the minutiae of the industry anywhere near as closely as I used to (thanks to the wokeness in media escalating to absurd degrees I've kind of retreated to other hobbies over the year). But what you say could track with a newfound direction for PlayStation with Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade leading the way, and Tekken 8 seemingly being part of the wave of games actually aimed at the core demographic of gamers.
The real tell will be what proper first-party titles look like coming down the pipeline, and whether they will buffer the support of the three aforementioned titles with other non-woke games, or if they will use those games to try to win back gamers and then bombard them with wokeness, similar to what Netflix does with the first season of a show being somewhat decent and then the subsequent seasons being full-on propaganda.
Hard to say. CDPR went woke but managed to recover thanks to the Cyberpunk anime, and now people have mostly forgiven them, so they now have leeway to fail or succeed again with whatever they make next. Microsoft went woke and has had nothing to recover them since all their supporting media is also still woke, like that Halo TV show. So it's not like they can leverage their current line-up of games based on cross-media success, because they have none. Had the Halo TV show been cool and successful, it might have rekindled interest in Halo Infinite, and then that would have been their success story, much like Edgerunners rekindling interest in Cyberpunk 2077.
Unless they have something special waiting in the wings or in development at one of the countless studios they've usurped, then no, I don't think they're close. Spencer isn't a dumb guy, though; he has to see the writing on the wall. No one wants to play Fugly Fable, or that voodoo-themed SBI game. But if I had to guess, Spencer will keep politicking his way through each quarter while more woke titles release.
If push comes to shove he might scout for an indie game still in development and purchase exclusivity rights for it to try to score some good goy points. Something cheap and fun, like Palworld, or that game where you play as a modern soldier in medieval times. Those kinds of AA-titles might be the fallback plan if things keep imploding for the Xbox brand.