Has Phil Spencer Been Good For Xbox? - Luke Reacts 

And all the rest of it, remember? Bundled with a Connect, always online, no physical disk... it's the reason I got a PS4.

@@cursedmonkey1033Uh, Kinect, I've tried to forget that disaster. It's kind of funny in a way, that Microsoft spent all of that money, billions of dollars to save the Xbox brand name during the RROD days, only to completely throw all of that effort away overnight by thinking people would want record Television onto their gaming device...

They wanted it to be the center of the living room why you could plug your cable through it but xbox forget that people by consoles to play games not TV

And zero reason to own an Xbox of any kind since that day.

At least that console launched with games… what did the Series X launch with ?

And made Sony make a subscription service aswell 😮

@@BB-pb3hvSony had ps now for years before. I hate all of the subscriptions…especially to just play online

@@BB-pb3hv made EVERYTHING a sub service imo, not just Playstation. Ubisoft+, EA Plus+ etc. I'm shocked Nintendo haven't done anything.. Yet.

Xbox was always a subscription service did you forget the original Xbox?

@@valor3918 Nintendo's classic catalogs are also subscription-based services.

Never gonna happwn sadly. They are double down in Dei and Esg. Look up who the type of people they hired for their gamea and how they work with Sbi.

@@Evorexwolf Spot on . 100% correct. I think they have completely lost their way and are more concerned with some SJW BS instead of hiring creative minds to make great games. If WokeBox doesn’t come out with something creative in this next generation, the gap between Xbox and Sony/Nintendo is only going to grow.

@@SS-qu9nn sadly it will never, right now is literal for xbox: make it or break it and that was LAST year. I expect absolutely nothing good coming from xbox, it'a a dead brand. Regardless of Hardware they sell, they cannot even make games and I do not trust or expect anything. Xbox themselves gave me buyer's remorse. I seriously wished I bought a ps4 10 years ago rather than an xbox, but it is what it is.

this... i dont care about their consoles or their exclusives... they just need quality control on their game studios

@@schikey2076 Bingo! But they will not. All this rdna 2 stuff and velocity tech is dumb since clearly whoever is in the high chair telling everyone what to do. Does not know themselvss either.

Totally true. The launch titles for xbox one were leagues better than the ps4. The online drm controversy scared away would be customers from the beginning.

​@@nexusvideo And the price - it was £100 more because of the Kinect

Phil has to have dirt on someone high up at Microsoft he’s ruined Xbox in so many ways granted he had help but still

@@WeKNOWTHETRUTHITSUNDISTPUTED also after the many failures of 343i there was no sense of urgency or a need to give their most valuable franchise to more capable hands. It’s sad.

@@RiderZer0 yes I was kinda hoping they would change halo to another studio but pride or something idk just have 343 work on something else

All those are ran by different studios now. Bungie , epic and Lionhead have moved on from xbox exclusives. Lionhead is dead ☠️

@@WeKNOWTHETRUTHITSUNDISTPUTED it could be they don’t have a better studio 💀 I mean think about it, they have fable to PLAYGROUND the racing studio lol

Xbox did have really good games though. And I think there’s something to be said about how far ahead they were with online connectivity. Xbox Live was so much better than PSN, PlayStation only just caught up in that department with the PS4.

It wasn't "just" because Sony screwed themselves. Look at the exclusive games the 360 was getting early on compared to playstation. Also xbox live became so intuitive and popular it became the go-to platform for multiplayer games. The issue is Xbox has completely lost that identity.

Curious, what 2 exceptions? I don't even know many Xbox IPs tbh. I just don't buy games much so I don't pay attention. One Xbox game I LOVED was State of Decay 2.

If he did that , at some point unless those titles were banger , it would dilute those franchise and have diminishing returns . Look at the state of some of their former powerhouses , like Halo , Fable , Gears . They did not even farm those really that much , but they crumbled with only a few bad or deemed less interesting entries . They don't even boast numbers for those anymore , just gamepass launch players essentially . Of course Besthesda can still ruin stuff on their own .... but it's less a risk than churning out their franchises

​​@@ZarathosDaimaoh it does feel like they farmed the halo/forza/gears trifecta since its the bulk of the stuff they released. Sure it wasnt as frequent to really milk, but when those are basicly the only thing u release since the 2nd half of the 360 era till now..... Sure thers a few exceptions like Sea of Thieves, but thers not that much else.

i think he had faith in bethesda and their new IP starfield which was a huge mistake. he shouldve pressured them into making elder scrolls first. now with starfields failure theyre definitely forcing them to make it next no matter what.

@@headshot531 Nah thats utter bullcrap, Starfield had already been worked on for years and years, u don't just go throw that in the bin because "go work on TES6", thats just utter stupidity what ur advocating there. Forcing them to make TES6 lol yea thats how it works right? lol. They arnt forcing anyone, TES6 already was slated to be next regardless. Ur just sayin nonsens.

nah he just needs to go in there, slap todd n tell him to get bethesda off the creation engine and onto unreal because Elder Scrolls 6 n Fallout 5 will flop if they don’t switch

On the team and in charge of the team is not the same thing. The Xbox One released in 2013 Phil Spencer didn't get put in charge until a year after that, probably because of what happened in 2013.

Go tell your boss to do something he doesn't wanna do let me know how it goes

@@Grimjr7 He was still a manager and was part of the committee around xbox one. Don mattrick was the head honcho but phil was still a high up manager. If you knew this was a bad idea I would of raised a red flag.

@@Grimjr7 lol Phil was part of the leadership team at the time, he was one of the people that got Xbox One in the situation it was in. He wasn’t head of the department, but was definitely involved and clearly pushed for. Go back and watch the coverage leading up to its launch.

@@nsbm159 He managed studios? Like all the mistakes on software and where studios went project wise came to his desk for approval. The xbox one though had a bad launch and bad messaging stink on it. At the end of the day it still did better than where xbox series is at and where their games are at. You can re-build your brand if you have great games. Thing is during spencer's tenure as a studio manager and as xbox ceo he axed tons of studios with legacy. Sony has done this too. And those people are now not at the company or in a position to over see them.

sorry but people overhype Obsidian too much ... the only reason Obsidian can even make Fallout New Vegas is because some of the original creators were there ( Chris Avellone)... just look at Outer Worlds and it's super clear to see at this point. people forgot game studios without their key figures are just powerful ships without their good captain...

@@schikey2076 ...The Outer Worlds was good though? And the original Creator of Fallout worked on that game (Tim Cain)? And it was made on a shoestring budget?

@@schikey2076 Uh Chris Avellone worked on the DLCs for new vegas. He's not the lead game director

Can’t believe people are still giving him a pass after a decade of mediocrity

What is Phil's role now anyways? he got promoted and somebody else took his job.

Sadly true

I would say Starfield was no matter how you feel about the games. It was the most played single-player game of 2023 and people sub to GP to play the game Amazon alone saw a 1000% increase in console sales.

Phil is charismatic that's all you need for most people. Once Xbox stopped focusing on the games near end of the 360 era their fate was sealed, but Gamepass has kept them afloat and ultimately led them to the publishing angle. Phil damned the consumer but found a niche for Xbox, Microsoft may end up quite happy with his work.

@@geronimo1595and even gamepass has ruined things developers that are 3rd party don’t even want to put there games on the Xbox platform because they know no one will buy it the very birth of gamepass was because no one was really buying games on Xbox

Your comment sums it up perfectly. They are so conditioned to wait for gamepass. Also, PS Plus is a real competitor to gamepass. They actually give you free games that are actually great that you can keep forever as long as you have Plus

@@geronimo1595Exactly, having both x360 and ps3 I remember thinking it seems like i never turned on my 360 after Kinect launched and i didn't get one, but was annoyed by all the Kinect talk. I was like who wants to be a controller? Sounded so stupid to me, im mean if your into DanceDR when they said xbox1 was launching with it that immediately decided for me. Glad i jumped on the right ship. And its sad because I thought Rise of Rome looked amazing, but the crisis demonstration had me like I'm good. The tv grift didn't help either. I still remember one of my friends saying but i can turn it on with my voice watch this, i was like WTF is that supposed to mean smh what does it do for games!!!! Nothing

game pass wouldn't even be thing if xbox was on par with sony and nintendo In hardware sales game pass was created out of the failure of xbox

​@Dribblepi55 its all marketing too. Psnow was first and had more games lol. But xbox didn't have games to promote so it was "GAMESPASS IS THE BEST DEAL IN GAMING" 247 365 from xbox marketing. In my opinion it's not even a good deal in general lol.

Let’s see how long exclusivity will be a thing with all the laws changing there terms to more open systems and against forced hardware/software ecosystems

@@Sassssky it is the best deal, way more games, backwards compatibility, AAA games, and it actually runs them well. PS Now couldn’t run Fallout NV for more than 10 min

@braxtonsmith3726 it never had more games lol

Its only percieved that way because 360 ruled the US, where most major game media are from. Rest of the world ps3 blew 360 away, but sentiment is still to a lot of ppl that 360 "won".

360 have it a run for us money, especially with the Nintendo Wii as a major competition. Microsoft Xbox division is doing something right. Xbox is making way more money than Playstation and Sony as a whole.

You can't really blame Microsoft for Kinect, though. Aping off the Wii and getting deeper into the casual market was just the trend back then. Even PlayStation did it with the Move.

I think Xbox being a console home to PC-like experience is really the selling point for me. Shooters came to console on Xbox. Bethesda-style RPGs came to console on Xbox. Survival games (including Minecraft) came to console on Xbox. Flight simulators came to console on Xbox. RTS and City-builders are a bigger thing on Xbox than on other consoles. Immersive sims have been really big on Xbox. That’s what Xbox is to me - an easy to use set hardware target that PC games come to at a good value.

​@bustanut5501 I remember back in the day though, another reason the kinect flopped was a lot of people were also worried on the prospect of putting what was a camera in your living room and no way to know wether Microsoft was spying on you or not. Even if it is taking clips of your game footage, it was a bit of a worry back then. It was also around to time built in cameras started popping up in laptops and most dident have shudders yet which also spying was a worry. Bonzi buddy style telemetry has been an issue with Microsoft/Xbox for years at this point and people were rightly worried.

​@@LordBeef I don't think they could do game pass easily without the xbox. I mean it does exist on PC but I am pretty sure it is only games that have a Microsoft Store PC version or need to be Cloud Streamed which is very hit or miss depending on where you live, and full stop the Microsoft Store is frozen barf on a stick if you have every tried playing any sort of major title on it before, hence why most of there games are on steam now.

@@arcadeportal32 True, but I think this concern only really came up with the One, right? Right after the PRISM leaks as well.

Except the PC handheld userbase (Steamdeck, Rog Ally, Ayaneo, GDP, Legion Go etc) is very tiny, like 10% of the VR userbase.

Very true

I hope so Microsoft finally quit the video game industry.

hahahaha 😂😭😭

Piss Poor Management. That's how. It is frustratingly common in all software industries.

i dont care about "muh exclusives"... they need quality control in their goddamn game studios.... they proved that they can make good games with Hi Fi Rush.

@@schikey2076 that's also true. The hands off approach hasn't favored them since their studios now lack a cohesive identity. When u get Sony or Nintendo 1st party games, there's an expectation and being part of the ecosystem has more sway than the individual developer. Whereas at Xbox you look to see what developer made then game cuz you know the quality changes greatly depending on the studio. They need quality control to gain that respect you expect from the other studios. Redfall should not exist.

All true. And they need to do something about the series s at this point. It's just sad and holding everything back

But... he's...'a true gamer' and 'one of us'.

Agreed and I'm glad to see discussions like this, the dude has done alot, won't deny that but omg has it been a marathon trying to get content, along with games, the dogshit communication, and the constant switching of strategies, they shoot themselves in the foot way too many times. With all the resources they have it shouldn't take all this time for a road map and GAMES

​@matthewdanahy9411 Better to wait for next consoles tbh. Even if the Series S became unsupported today, it doesn't change much. You will not convince management to approve a massive redesign of a product halfway, or more, through development.

as a massive Xbox fan i’d say generally yes BUT the console is the best place for the full game pass experience, the thing that sold me on the xbox was a mixture of game pass and back compat. The FPS boosts and little graphical tweaks make the back compat an absolute BEAST which in turns makes game pass even better.

People will kill you for saying this. But at the same time he is also responsible for the 360. The time everyone loved Xbox.

Stop

I noticed a lot of people are rewriting the Xbox One so that it seems Donny Matt is some kind of monster and didn't do a good job on the Xbox One. As the guy who did good in later part of the 360, only slowly letting things get out of hand with the rise of Kinect's success (also him) but still releasing some good games, he did a great job with the games and deals he set up for the Xbox One. it wouldn't be until mid 2015 where we started seeing what Phil would do and I think we need to compare the two for how they handled the Xbox One given that the biggest problem people had was the pre-release policies which were almost all turned around before launch (and ironically several of those policies people don't mind now) and the bad messaging from guys Larry hyrb under his watch. But otherwise he had a good game plan. Don Mattrick 1. Saw the launch of Xbox one joining sony in breaking the record of 1 million consoles sold in the first 24 hours 2. His team led to the first 15 million units of sales which others coming in during the restructuring failed to do, so of the ~50 million Xbox One sales the first 15 million were in just a bit over 1 year, a massive chunk, before the decline then the static yearly sales until 2020. 3. Killer Instinct reboot, japanese exclusive Chaos Child, Titanfall deal, Fable Legends, Scalebound deal, Quantum Break contract, Crackdown 3, Forza 5, Ryse deal, Dead Rising 3 deal, Fighters within, Lococycle, power star golf, Xbox Fitness, Max curse of brotherhood, Halo Spartan assault, Zoo tycoon. all ready and in place before the end of 2013 in the launch window. 4. Had already got the deal going for Titanfall, Kinect sports rivals, got dev for Gears remake started, had already had 343i on the Halo MCC, had the Tomb Raider and Evolve(for 2015) deals ready, Got Dance Central spotlight ready, D4 Deal, Starpoint gemini indie deal, had Forza Horizon 2 ready, greenlit the Project Spark project, got the deal for Fantasia music evolved, partnered for Kalimba and ubisofts Shape up. These all were released in 2014 Phil Spencer 1. Screamride. Made the deal for Sunset overdrive when Insomniac needed a pub. Cancelled Scalebound, Cancelled Fable Legends, delayed Crackdown 3, delayed Quantum Break, did a bad job controlling issues with Halo MCC at launch. Oversaw Halo 5 disappointment. Ori and the Blind Forest, Fruit Ninja Kinect, then went on to move support away from Kinect, and got developers to as well resulting in Kinect being dead. Closed several studios without replacing them with anything, put Xbox at the lowest studio count in the history of the brand by late year. State of decay, happy wars. Rare Replay. Forza 6, 2. In 2016, finally releases Don signed Quantum Break after long delays, Raiden V, Recore, Forza Horizon 3, releases don signed Gears 4, , new hardware revision, Xbox One S. 3. In 2017, Project Scorpio Xbox One X revision, halo wars 2, Halo wars definitive, Forza 7, BC, Gamepass, Voodoo Vince remastered timed, Cuphead deal indie, rereleasing Don Kinect Disney games but for controller only to pad out the lineup, Super luckys tale (console launch exclusive for One X), Hello neighbor (console launch exclusive), Pubg timed, acquisitions storm starts. Phil had cut off many good staff and closed studios and reduced the amount of studios under Microsoft to the lowest point (5 or so studios, 3-4 AAA) with cancellations, delays even with other games I haven't listed as there's several, while seeing a decline in top franchises, and for those games he didn't cancel he didn't over see them resulting in ok or mediocre releases, bad timed deals except for a few that didn't do much of anything, the death of Kinect burning those players, rereleasing Kinect games from the 360 with the 3 Disney games to pad out a bad lineup, and going on an acquisition spree. Phil Spencer has had almost 10 years and has nothing to really show for it. He never built the Xbox brand back up to respectability, we have had no new IPs that have done anything, the IPs we did have currently are non existent or in mediocrity. Realistically, people love to act like Phil is so great because “wow! He plays games and I can follow him on my Xbox” but the reality is, we should all be gunning for his head. Ok, so they bought up all these studios and launched Gamepass. I’d argue that Gamepass is a non-factor as they are not meeting their own internal expectations. All the studios they’ve purchased have yet to deliver anything worth note. Starfield came and went with a whimper.

Umm...NO!

​@josetomascamposrobledano4618 Peter Moore was responsible for the strategy and launch of the Xbox 360 actually. When Mattrick became head after it had already launched, he slowly shifted the focus to casual games and Kinect. He was responsible for the Xbox One launch, though, and we all know how that went!

What 3? I dont remember any of them!

Months ago 😂 Are all you people going on youtube on your phones or those shitty macbooks that can only play 6 games on steam? The fuck...

I wouldn't really call someone who sang high praises for Redfall and Starfield a 'true gamer', but ok.

​@@yatharthrai4658 and what about they whole library of games that received upgrades for the new hardware, or the gamepass or letting studios doing smaller stuff like pertinent or hi fi rush, if you are gonna nitpick ok 2 games instead the whole vision you are dumb

@@yatharthrai4658 He had admitted Redfall was broken on launch and apologised to the community... he's the CEO, he doesn't test the game himself. How many times did you see Jim Ryan apologising for games like Forspoken or TLOU on PC? Too proud for that. Phil Spencer loves Starfield and last year he showed that he's put +100 hours into the game. Don't get me wrong the game looks awful🤣 but it's proof that he loves gaming.

But did he really do "their own thing" ? Aside from trying to build up the gamerpass , in the end they entered the same usual dance of acquiring studios and exclusives . And didn't the legal battles over activision reveal some of MS' intentions toward Sony at the time ? The issues with Phil and his natural charisma .. he says a lot of things that would sound right , some that he likely genuinely believe , but he's just saying them .. not necessarily following through them .

@@ZarathosDaimaoh bro did you forget that he made a bunch of games of Xbox era available and offered free updates for those games? Or that you can play anywhere those Xbox games, you don't give him enough credit to the man honestly

I don't see how crippling the video game industry for the sake of forcing microtransactions everywhere and pandering to casuals is healthy.

With Xbox more and more going the Open Source PC Route, we could have an actual Archivement here

Delivering great games already started to dry up in the 2nd half of the 360 era (with lots of kinect focus instead) and MS never recovered. Guess who was part of the Xbox leadership all that time? Yup, good old Uncle Phil the Gamer.

I'm confused either Xbox has always been a third party publisher or they're not a third party publisher. Those are the only two options. I say this because Xbox has already had games on PlayStation before those four games were announced and Xbox put their games on PC already. This by definition would make them a third party developer already. But then by this logic PlayStation is also a third party developer then. And the other option would be that they're not a third party developer because all of their games are not going to PlayStation. Just like all the PlayStation games aren't going to Xbox. PlayStation and Xbox put some of their games on other platforms.

Very good questions