Call me crazy but this was a necessary wake-up call. Xbox’s past games have been at least 80s and/or acceptable and good enough to see it as a success. When you think about it, this is an actual first hit Phil has to witness himself. It’s been baffling for people out there to say Xbox is in danger when majority of them have been a hit or solid. This one is one that hits him.
If you can learn from your mistake, you will become stronger.
This might be the best thing to come out of this. I do not believe in the limited integration like that. With individual studios with different needs, sure. But just letting an entire publisher, who clearly had problems before being acquired, continue as normal? Nah.
Phil was incredibly honest about their place in the console market, saying even if they ship great games the console market will not dramatically shift, they lost an incredibly important gen in Xbox One and people are already tied to their devices, he says their business is not to outsell Playstation and Nintendo in the console space
He’s very aware of the discourse around xbox.
People can use Age of Empires, etc etc as a shield but he knows Redfall was supposed to be the big AAA game since Halo Infinite and they failed to deliver on that. That’s a gut wrenching thing to experience for someone who’s in tuned with the Xbox community like Phil is.
An interesting thing about the Phil interview, he said that they swarmed Starfield with resources because it was early in production. So that means Starfield went into production probably in 2020. Bethesda do a lot of up front pre-production and usually have short production cycles.
Arkane Austin was heavy into production and didn’t take advantage of the resources.
The question is how their internal mocks for Redfall can be double digits higher than real metacritic scores?
I wonder theoretically if there is someone at Microsoft saying " hey I think Redfall is good to go at current state, probably a 75mtc launch, not too bad!"
If that’s a thing I think some of the internal QA should have reflective thinking now… That just goes too far from realistic condition.
This feels like the consumer facing version of an all hands at work when sentiment is bad.
I see plenty of people that like the game though, at least enough for it to not be in the 60s.
I do agree with him somewhat but on the flipsside, GP kind of eliminates the worry of being invested
I get that a playstation gamer might not want to leave their library behind but with xbox, you dont need to start building a second one, just sub to GP
Also explains why Series S is so important to them, instead of buying a PS5 or an Xbox, the Series S is there so if you buy a PS5 you can get an Xbox alongside it
Nah, the same thing happend between Sea of Thieves, SoD 2 and Crackdown 3. CD 3 was all hyped up to be another pillar next to Halo, Forza and Gears. Got slaughtered by reviewers and fans (i’m the only one who liked it and wants another one). Then Phil promised better quality, which worked out for the most part afterwards for Xbox Game Studios who delivered high quality (only Bleeding Edge was really bad).
Now Bethesda delivered a disappointing miss in Redfall. I would like to see a similar redemption arc for them.
I dont agree. Every day new children are born without a digital ID or console library.
i don’t recall crackdown 3 being promised as the next big pillar or something. but eh w/e.
Haha, yeah Crackdown 3 was getting slaughtered long before release. I think we might have been suprised it even made it out
That is something I didn’t expect, I thought it had been in full production for much longer. But overall development is still quite long I’m sure, like you said they do a lot of up front preproduction. They probably started work on it right after Fallout 76, probably before that.
That sounds more like humble PR-speak though. If they were not looking to compete they wouldn’t be in the business. It’s the right thing to say at this moment, for a lot of reasons.
My paraphrasing was a bit bold 
They delayed it to have a place near Halo and Gears.
Second part is that we really want to make games that have the opportunity to become a franchise that can sit next to Halo, sit next to Gears. Now, that doesn’t mean that we want everyone of our studios to be an IP factory and that they all have to make sequels. That’s not at all what I’m saying. What I’m saying is we want a game to have the potential to give birth to a world that could expand, create characters that could have multiple iterations. We want that depth and that richness that could go on and do other things. We’ve just got to make sure that we give our games enough time to do that.
This was from Booty himself. Didn’t work out in the end. Oh well, i liked it very much 
I think looking to compete in the console market is different than looking to compete in the gaming market overall. They are leveraging PC and cloud because it’s where they have strengths and they can’t necessarily come out in win with console alone.
I hope it is, because if not, I wonder how important for them a mid gen refresh would be, or if they would be OK with Sony having a significantly better console. Assuming the reports are true about a Pro. Don’t get me wrong, I rather not see mid gen refresh at all, certainly not so damn soon, but I don’t want Xbox to lag behind, so to speak.
Fallout 76 was probably all hands on deck to fix. So everything got pushed out.
Phil Spencer is that dude. It takes a serious backbone to go right out immediately and field these kinds of questions. Maximum respect.
Yeah, insiders said this too back then, all hands on deck for 76. This shows how way too optimistic they were with that 11-11-22 release date. And Schreier said this too, that he heard from people on the project that this was no way 11-11-22.
But surely the new date is them not being overly optimistic, just comfortably certain, I guess.