“We’re learning and growing through this process, which is giving us more confidence that we should do more,” said Spencer. “We learned from doing Halo. We learned from doing Fallout. So all of these build on themselves. And obviously we’ll have a couple that miss. But what I’d say to the Xbox community that likes this work is, ‘You’re going to see more, because we’re gaining confidence and we’re learning through this.’”

The statement from Spencer comes leading up to the theatrical release of A Minecraft Movie. The movie’s title, according to Legendary’s chairman of worldwide production Mary Parent, comes from the fact that Minecraft as a game doesn’t have a singular story to it. Rather, owing to the title’s sandbox nature, there are many possible stories that can be told through it.

“We’re calling it ‘A Minecraft Movie’ because we’re respecting the fact that there’s no one story that drives the game,” said Parent to variety.

A Minecraft Movie had been in production for quite some time. The first mentions of a movie based on the game being in production came all the way back in 2014, before Minecraft developer Mojang was even acquired by Microsoft.

As for Halo‘s adaptation, the show got two seasons before ultimately being cancelled by Paramount+. The cancellation came in light of the heavy criticism faced by the TV show. Aside from Halo, however, other adaptations of video games have been seeing quite a bit of success. Other than the massive franchise that the Sonic the Hedgehog movies have turned into, there have also been critically acclaimed TV adaptations of The Last of Us (via HBO) and Fallout (via Amazon Prime).

The success of the Fallout adaptation was notable enough that it saw many players, new and returning, play games from throughout the franchise. Fallout 76 creative director Jon Rush spoke about this recently, saying that players were going all the way back to titles like Fallout 3.

“The game continues to be a success,” said Rush about Fallout 76. “We definitely saw a lot of success last year with the release of the show and the show kind of casting a bit of a spotlight on all the Fallout IP. So, there were people hopping into Fallout 3, 4, 76. 76 is still thriving, it’s still growing. We have more ideas than we could possibly ever do and have no plans to stop. We’re going to continue supporting this game, continue supporting our players and telling the story. There’s never been a better time to adventure with your friends in the wasteland.”

The Last of Us, on the other hand, is set to premier its second season on April 13. Leading up to the first episode of its second season, a new trailer was released for the show.

“I think we’ve shown respect for people’s libraries over the generations with back-compat and Play Anywhere, and I want to continue to do that,” said Spencer, who goes on to point out that every game available through Game Pass can also be bought for keeps.

“You can buy every game that’s in Game Pass, we’re not trying to funnel everybody into one business model,” he said. “Play the games the way you want to play them.”

“We obviously have to run a good business, so we’ll have our pricing and everything that we do, but I want to make as many options as possible for the games that we have.”

Spencer’s statement about subscription services and owning games are in contrast to a statement Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay made back in January 2024. Back then, Tremblay said in an interview that gamers would have to start “feeling comfortable with not owning your game.” He was referring to the factors preventing the growth of Ubisoft’s own subscription service, Ubisoft+.

In the same XboxEra interview, Spencer also spoke about how Microsoft was able to grow its gaming business in new markets like Asia without having to focus on console sales. Instead, Spencer credited the PC market, along with services like Game Pass and Cloud Gaming with growth in the markets.

“It’s why us embracing Windows and embracing Cloud has allowed us to grow,” said Spencer. “One of our fastest growing regions for us right now is Asia and it’s not because we’re selling more consoles in Asia, but through cloud and PC, we’re finding more users year over year than in any other place. The fastest kind of platform is Cloud. That’s the thing that’s growing the fastest year over year and those are players like you were talking about, like that radio host. We were never going to catch that person with our console. So let’s find them in a way that works, and it’s better for Indiana Jones. It’s better for Xbox.”

Spencer also spoke about how releasing Xbox games on other platforms like PlayStation has benefitted the company. By not focusing on the 30 percent Xbox has to pay to PlayStation for every sale of a title like Sea of Thieves, the company is instead focusing on the 70 percent it is making off these sales, which then go on to fund more games at Xbox’s studios.

“It’s maybe not what I was going to say on stand at the time,” said Spencer. “But yeah, I would love to make all of the money for all of the games that we ship right, like obviously we make more on our own platform. It’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important. But there are people, whether it’s their libraries on a PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there.”

Speaking in an interview with Windows Central, Spencer talks about the company’s plans with future releases. He starts things off by outright stating that there are no current plans to bring Game Pass to PlayStation or Nintendo platforms.

“I’ll start by saying we have no plans to bring Game Pass to PlayStation or Nintendo,” Spencer said. “It’s not in our plans.”

Spencer goes on to talk about Xbox CFO Tim Stuart’s earlier comments about bringing the service to “every screen that can play games” at a talk at the recent Wells Fargo TMT Summit, indicating that it instead meant that the company would be focusing less on hardware and more on offering more compelling software and services.

“The thing I want to be focused on is how do we continue to innovate for people who’ve made the commitment to our hardware platform? And how do we continue to make sure that they feel great about their investment in what we’ve built,” he says. “…I want us to continue to innovate, so people on our console feel like we’re making investments in console that matches their commitment they’re making to us.”

In the same interview, Spencer also spoke about potential upgrades to other Xbox services, including improvements to the long-stagnant Achievements system that was first introduced on the Xbox 360.

“There’s a hardware roadmap, there’s a service roadmap, maybe there’s even a roadmap for improvements to Xbox Achievements, which I know is something that you and many others care about,” Spencer said.

Unfortunately, Spencer doesn’t really offer up any real details in terms of what we can expect with an update to the system. Some of improvements to the system that Xbox players have been asking about for a while have been smaller features, like more visibility for the Games Completed section of the Achievements.

The company is currently gearing up for The Game Awards 2023, for which important announcements have been teased. Announced through an email to Xbox users, the company seems to be ready to unveil some new products at the event. For context, the last time Xbox made a big deal about The Game Awards, it unveiled the Xbox Series X at the event.

Spencer made the statement responding to a question about Microsoft’s vision after its successful acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Spencer also said that he considers Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally users to be part of the Xbox community as well.

According to Spencer, players on different platforms are considered part of the Xbox community owing to the fact that several games developed by Xbox-owned studios are available and played on the other platforms, including Redfall, Starfield, and more recently, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Spencer also said that the acquisition now allows Microsoft to publish more games than ever before on to more platforms.

Microsoft completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard just last month, bringing in various franchises, including Diablo, Warcraft and Call of Duty, under the Xbox umbrella. Spencer has previously stated that, despite the acquisition, Call of Duty will not have any content exclusive to Xbox.

Both Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have also revealed that Call of Duty and Diablo won’t be coming to Game Pass before the end of the year.

“We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play,” said Spencer. “Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up.”

The Xbox mobile app store is being developed to be released in time for EU’s Digital Markets Act, which is set to happen in March 2024. “The Digital Markets Act that’s coming, those are the kinds of things that we are planning for,” said Spencer. “I think it’s a huge opportunity.”

Microsoft’s plans of launching a mobile app store based on Xbox were first officially revealed in an official filing part of the acquisition of Activision Blizzard back in October 2022. Since then, the acquisition has been the subject of scrutiny by various regulatory bodies, including the EU’s European Commission.

Spencer recently made an interesting declaration: that Microsoft is going to be more clear and transparent this console cycle, and that the reveal of the games people can expect to play on the Series X is “soon”. It is, obviously, an exciting comment, but it is also something that inspires some confidence in the Xbox brand going into the next generation, and demonstrates that they may have learned from the mistakes that have sunk them in the past.

The more straightforward part of that statement is, obviously, about the games. Those game announcements and reveals are coming soon, hopefully – general expectation appears to be that Microsoft will show some titles off next month – and that brings with it a level of excitement. Not least because this is the first time we get to really see what a bespoke next generation Xbox Series X game might be like (our only glimpses at the next generation so far have been Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2), but also because this will probably be the first time we see some results from Microsoft’s recent spate of acquisitions.

In response to the criticisms about the company’s failings on the first party and exclusive games front, Microsoft has bought out a lot of promising looking studios – from Ninja Theory to Playground Games – and this will be the first time we get to see some real fruits of their shopping spree (the few games we have seen from these studios since their purchase have been smaller scale experimental projects, such as Bleeding Edge).

But the more interesting part of the statement is Spencer’s declaration that Xbox will be more transparent and “authentic” this generation, not least because it is an implicit admission of mistakes, as well as a tacit admission of not being that the previous generation. While under Phil Spencer, Xbox’s marketing and messaging has generally been clear and straightforward, the Xbox One’s fate was sealed very early on in the console generation, when Microsoft’s confusing and frankly arrogant messaging surrounding the then upcoming console (from the always online DRM to its relative lack of power next to the PS4 to the forced inclusion of Kinect) ended up damaging the console’s perception with the public strongly.

It never recovered, and among many of the more casual gaming public, a lot of misunderstandings surrounding the console remained (such as a belief that you could not play used games on the console, because the Xbox One had originally been planned to not allow that).

As I said, this is something they slowly became better at over the course of the generation. By the time they were introducing fan favorite initiatives such as backward compatibility, Play Anywhere, or Game Pass, there was a refreshing earnestness and honesty about their messaging. We were told exactly what we were getting, and nothing more.

But even in spite of that, there were some lingering remnants of the tendency to muddy the waters – their refusal to share sales numbers for their consoles or games, for example, opting instead for more nebulous indicators of success, such as Average Monthly Users (though this is at least somewhat justifiable in context of Microsoft’s broader company-wide pivot to services). Or take the confusing implication that the Xbox One S is a 4K console in early marketing (it can play 4K movies and videos, yes, but it cannot play games in 4K) – though, once again, that seems to have stopped of late (and especially since the One X started being marketed).

There has been an element of mistrust towards the company by a lot of users this generation, then, in part because of Microsoft’s early failures with the Xbox One, and in part because even under the otherwise impeccable stewardship of Phil Spencer, there have been times when Xbox has felt frustratingly opaque. And while attributing the console’s struggles this generation to just that would be extremely simplistic – we have already discussed so many other reasons for that in just this piece alone – it is still a reason for why the brand saw a relative decline compared to the Xbox 360 heyday.

So, back to Spencer’s statement, then: he promises more authenticity and transparency going forward. And assuming this isn’t just lip service – which we have no reason to think it is, judging by Spencer’s excellent track record on following through on his promises so far – this is yet another promising indication that the company is willing to reflect, introspect, and learn from its mistakes. This is yet another sign that Xbox is willing to not repeat its own failings, and to actively work on improving itself.

That kind of underlying attitude is what Microsoft needs as it heads into the next generation, if it hopes to match Sony on a more even footing this time around. Addressing every individual mistake from the Xbox One era, as Microsoft has done so far, is extremely important, of course – but that’s a bit like patching up holes in a boat after it’s begun to sunk. It’s good you’re doing it, but you should never have let it sink in the first place.

This attitude of wanting to be better overall, however, is a lot like steering the ship so well it never got those holes in the first place – and right now, that’s what Microsoft seems to be doing. And that’s a good thing. That means they won’t have to spend as much time on reacting to their failures next generation, as they have had to this generation. It means they will be spending more time with a better output of games, and better overall value offerings for players. And that only adds value to video games as a medium, as a whole.

That is, of course, good news for anyone that likes games – you get more great ones in the bargain. It’s also, obviously, good news for Xbox fans, since they can look forward to a far better generation than the one they just had. And even hardlined PlayStation fans stand to benefit from this, because Sony is at its best when it is trying to combat and quench the Xbox – such as through the late PS3 era, or the entirety of the Xbox One generation. Microsoft being good only pushes Sony to be even better (and so it goes back and forth).

Literally everyone benefits. Just look at how much healthier the industry is when Nintendo is not flailing like with the Wii U, but thriving with the Switch. As it is there, so it is with Xbox too.

So yes, with this recent statement, Spencer has only given us all more reason to be optimistic for the future of Xbox. And in the process, hopefully, he has given everyone – even those who might swear by PlayStation or PC or Nintendo – a reason to look forward to what the next generation brings. Bring it on.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer may not be all that interested in getting VR to run on the upcoming Xbox Scarlett, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate the format at all. In fact, on Twitter, responding to a fan complaining about his recent remarks about VR, Spencer revealed he already got to play Half-Life: Alyx earlier this year – and that he found it amazing.

Responding to a fan, he admits that he may have seemed dismissive about VR, but that he admires it, as well as all other technical innovation occurring in the games industry right now, before revealing that he’s played Alyx already, and he enjoyed it greatly.

Half-Life: Alyx, of course, is the upcoming new entry in the Half-Life universe – the first in almost 15 years – which launches exclusively for PC VR headsets supporting the SteamVR standard next year (something that has made a lot of folks fundamentally opposed to VR unhappy). Given Valve’s breaking of new ground with every previous Half-Life game, I am fully confident they will blaze the trail again with Half-Life: Alyx and VR. And Spencer’s comments only serve to reinforce that confidence.

Fair feedback. I've said publically, I love how our industry has pioneered: AI, physics, 3D, RT, VR/AR etc. For us, it's about focus on our innovations right now. I've played some great VR games, I got to play HL:Alyx in the summer, amazing. It's just not our focus with Scarlett

— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) November 27, 2019

A lot of VR and Xbox fans were disappointed yesterday when Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirmed categorically that there were no plans to have the upcoming Xbox Scarlett support VR (we have come a long way from the days when VR was used as one of the selling points in the unveil of the then-still-called Scorpio).

Spencer’s justification appears to be sound: that there isn’t much market demand for something like VR, and that as an isolating experience, it’s antithetical to what Microsoft goes for with its games. Put simply, VR is not a focus for Microsoft right now (though that could change) because customers are apparently not asking for it.

It was that last bit that Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida, now leading their indie outreach program, seemingly responded to on Twitter, out of the blue. While he didn’t tag Spencer or Xbox – that would have been really something, if he had – he just randomly tweeted, with no provocation, that “sometimes we work hard to make things no customers are asking for.”

Of course, Sony has a vested interest in the future of the VR market, given the PlayStation VR, with almost 5 million units sold, is actually the market leader right now of that admittedly negligible segment. So it makes sense for Yoshida to make that remark.

I just don’t expect it to change Spencer’s mind.

（´-`）.｡oO（we oftentimes work hard to make things that no customers are asking for them）

— Shuhei Yoshida (@yosp) November 26, 2019

Yesterday, we reported on the highly surprising news that Microsoft and Sony had come together for a collaboration in relation to gaming. It will be less about direct game development (so stop dreaming about Gears of War for PS4, I know you are), and more about the two combining technology for cloud-based infrastructure. Someone who digs the collaboration? Xbox Head and Vice President of Microsoft’s Gaming Division, Phil Spencer.

You can see the tweet from his official Twitter below, where he references the deal and talks about the two companies pursuing mutual gaming ambitions. Imagine that, the main Xbox executive tagging Sony directly in a tweet. Times sure do change.

It’s no surprise that Spencer would be all about the deal, though. In his relatively short time heading the Xbox division, he’s overseen a lot of expansion of Microsoft’s gaming brand past the single console approach, particularly in bringing once-exclusive Xbox IPs to PC.

Excited about the opportunities ahead with @Sony for us to pursue our mutual gaming ambitions and delight players around the world. https://t.co/3vBuQiruiR

— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) May 16, 2019