Phil Spencer admitted to making “some of the worst game choice decisions” throughout his career with Microsoft Gaming but says he tries to stay positive about the good things he is a part of. Over the weekend at PAX West, Spencer joined Andrea Rene to talk about his career in gaming (both playing the games and helping sign them to be made) on the below stream titled “Story Time with Phil Spencer.” Probably most notably, he isn’t wearing a game shirt to tease some kind of future announcement possibly.
The talk of regrets in Phil Spencer’s career starts around the 43-minute mark in the video. When focused on Destiny, Spencer talked about the time he spent closely working alongside Bungie when they were developing the Halo games. When he tried the first Destiny, it didn’t really “click” with him. He says he was worried it was going to become too engrossed in PvP, which it obviously didn’t.
Another game Phil Spencer says got away from him was the original Guitar Hero, which notably also got picked up by Activision. He didn’t believe that players would buy the plastic guitars and want to play a glorified version of Simon, which, honestly, we have never thought about before.
With the talk of PlayStation wrapping up various exclusives these days, like Final Fantasy and Black Myth: Wukong, Phil Spencer gets a lot of criticism for his handling of exclusives. In his line of work, everyone is going to have regrets when they see a former opportunity become a big moneymaker for someone else.
While it is easy to harp on Spencer for all of the games he has let get away in his Xbox career, we should also note the successes. He acknowledges that Gears of War in 2006 was the first game his team signed, and that has become one of Xbox’s highest profile exclusives in the time since. Even when Epic was moving away from Gears to focus on developing the original iteration of Fortnite, now known as Save the World, Phil did all he could to make sure the series continued and that the Coalition was created to keep things going.
