My fundamental point was that we’re not here to grow at the expense of the other players. Our plan is to help grow the industry and obviously to get our share of that growth. Sometimes from members of the press, definitely from members of the community … you need your Spider-Man, you need your God of War, you need to go create a movie or a television series that’s as good as The Last of Us. And what I try to get through to people – and I don’t always do it the best way – is that’s not our strategy. If we’re just growing and Sony’s shrinking, that doesn’t help anybody. Maybe if all you care about is Xbox success versus Sony’s success, but in terms of an industry, it doesn’t help Electronic Arts. It doesn’t help Ubisoft, it doesn’t help Fortnite. It doesn’t help anybody if all we’re doing is trading one customer for another customer on a different console.”
“I knew that our first party was gonna be strong,” he says. “We have over 20 studios, and it was somewhat expected that they would get up to speed after Covid and get their product coming out. We knew the flow coming out of both Bethesda and Xbox Game Studios was gonna hit. I’ll be honest, I always feel like we have a lot to live up to. The expectation of our customers is high. We know we didn’t hit that bar in 2022 and we wanted to make sure we had a great show.”
“Our business right now, from a revenue standpoint, is about twice the size as it was in the Xbox 360 generation. And we’re millions of consoles ahead of where we would’ve been compared to 360. We’ve never had more Xbox players than we have right now.”
“I wouldn’t say Halo is of lesser importance, but we have over 20 studios now,” Spencer says. “I’ll go back to the years where I had basically four games – Fable, Forza, Halo, Gears, the four horseman of the apocalypse. We have a lot more games now.
