Xbox boss Phil Spencer continues to be surprisingly candid about the state of the platform and its struggles since the Xbox One's launch. It's no secret that the company is positioning itself to compete at a different level with the launch of Project Scarlett, Xbox's next-gen console, in 2020. But the how and why Xbox spent the Xbox One generation rebuilding and restructuring is a complicated topic that Spencer is willing to lend some insight into.

In an interview with Kotaku, one line of questioning provides a much deeper look at Spencer's take on Xbox's current positioning. It starts with a question about why there was no new Forza game to show at E3 2019, as Forza is an annual franchise with Motorsport and Horizon typically alternating release years. Spencer replies directly by saying the show focused on games coming out in the next 12 months, but also more broadly, saying, "It was nice -- and this hasn't always been the case with our first-party line-up -- where we've had the ability to not show everything all the time."

Spencer explores this point further in the next question, which politely digs at whether Xbox's first-party titles quality has seen a dip in recent years. "Quality of first-party is very important," is Spencer's direct answer, but he goes on to acknowledge a deeper issue from Xbox's recent past. "We did reach a time in our first-party where the number of games and studios that we actually had and were investing in put a lot of pressure on everything we were doing."

He then said that it was much more "difficult" to manage the situation when studios were having to "hit a date" that was picked three years in advance "at the very high level of quality." In other words, due to Xbox Game Studios' limited resources and harsh deadlines, the studios weren't able to create games to their full potential. To Spencer's credit, he never says that those games are disappointing in any way. He's clearly a supporter of all his studios' work. But, as befits an executive, he wants to do better and knows his studios are capable of it.

xbox game studios

It's easy for Spencer to say it, and easier for fans to hear it, knowing that Microsoft and Xbox have already done the work to fix this problem. Xbox Game Studios is now 15 different teams strong, with both a large number of acquisitions being made over the past year or so and new studios being built from the ground up. Forza taking 2019 off is just one example of studios being given more time to work on what's coming next.

Of course, the tacit promise being made by Spencer is that first-party game quality from Xbox, whether it's on PC or Project Scarlett, is going to improve. That Xbox players should expect both more games and better games. Those fans will make the best out games like Gears 5 and of services like Game Pass for the time being, but they're also expecting Spencer to deliver, likely starting with Project Scarlett and then onward without pause. Recognizing that isn't the same as delivering it, so we'll see what happens in the future.

Source: Kotaku