Phil Spencer: Xbox One’s DRM Rollbacks Weren’t Easy Changes, Had An Impact On The Engineering Team

Ever since the Xbox One was first revealed during the pre-E3 presentation in May, it has seen nothing but bad times and PR disasters. But after the reversal of Microsoft’s draconian DRM policies and a return to form during Gamescom has made the Xbox One a worthy challenger in the eight generation of video game consoles.

Head of Microsoft Game Studios, Phil Spencer recalls the hard time the engineering team faced when they sat down to make the changes and how they eventually learned something good out of it.

“Sitting around the table in June, July, those [DRM rollbacks] weren’t easy changes, because we were late in the development cycle. Making those changes late has an impact on the engineering team. You’re balancing a lot of things. But it was a good learning experience. I will take away from that a desire for us to make sure that we’re telling the complete story. You can always learn. We definitely did,” he said in an interview with Polygon.

We can imagine the amount of stress that development team must have under gone to make those changes, but why did they had those policies in the first place? Microsoft have been trying hard to get more games on the system with recent ID@Xbox policy for indie developers. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out in the coming months and 2014. Microsoft’s Xbox One launches on November 22nd, 2013.