During a trip to the UK, the head of the gaming division of Microsoft Phil Spencer made time to visit the Xbox On studio, Xbox UK’s YouTube channel, for give an interview and talk about the topics that have been orbiting the Xbox world lately. Let’s see what she talked about.
Spencer first mentioned the fact that the Xbox team is currently busy – and has already started working on it since December – in programming the summer showcase already announced when the news of the absence of Xbox from E3 spread. And for the first time the month of the Showcase is mentioned: June, so close to the E3 events. Of course that doesn’t mean Xbox will stop making announcements until June, and Spencer explained that there will be more announcements and surprises in the months that separate us from the Showcase.
Regarding his current presence in the UK, Spencer also stated that he is on his way to the studio Ninja Theory to see for the first person the progress made with Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II; who is preparing to show it again at the Showcase in June, perhaps finally announcing the release date?
The manager found a few words for too Fable, explaining that he worked on the first game at the time, so it’s something he cares about and has a specific idea of how it should be; for this reason he tries to follow the development of the new game and claims that the Playground team is making great progress.
The questions then moved on to the topic that has been holding the table for more than a year, that is the acquisition of Activision Blizzard: Spencer said he can’t wait to complete the acquisition, proving to be rather optimistic about its success. Speaking of the thorny topic of exclusivity of Call of Duty, the manager also stated that Microsoft has never been interested in any form of exclusivity, and that once the acquisition is complete there will be no exclusives of any kind for Xbox, not even in content as Sony does today with its sales agreements. marketing: the company’s goal is to make CoD even bigger and more important, and this cannot be achieved by removing it in whole or even in part from other platforms. Spencer once again made the comparison with the Minecraft franchise, which enjoys the same support on all platforms, explaining that for CoD it will be the same thing.
Phil then went on to reiterate a concept already expressed in the past, namely that the acquisition of Activision Blizzard aims to help Xbox become a platform that can allow gamers to play wherever they want and video game creators to release their own titles wherever they wish; to do this the mobile world is very important being the largest “platform” on the planet, and it is precisely this market that Microsoft is targeting with the acquisition in progress, given that Activision Blizzard is the largest mobile publisher outside of China. In fact, we recall that Bob Kotick’s company owns important mobile titles such as CoD Mobile, Diablo Immortal, Heartstone but above all King titles such as Candy Crush.
The topic of discussion then moved on to Bethesda: about the exclusivity of Starfield, Spencer explained that in this case he didn’t steal anything from the players of the other platforms because the game had never been “promised” to them, and on the other hand since the announcement of the acquisition he had explained that the decisions on exclusivity would have been taken on a case-by-case basis. Some games make more sense that they are exclusive (after all, the competition has its own exclusive games), others instead – like The Elder Scrolls Online o Fallout 76 – they need more platforms on which to thrive.
Spencer also talked about theconsole argument, because some think that Microsoft’s current policy is to abandon the console world to focus solely on the cloud, PC and mobile. The manager explained that he loves the console experience and giving life to new hardware, and he wants this type of experience to remain available to players forever. He explained that even for Xbox hardware is very important, but creating good hardware doesn’t automatically mean stealing content from other players, and this is the policy that Microsoft is trying to implement.
Spencer finally found the time to comment on the recent technologies of generative AI that are revolutionizing the world in all fields (ChatGPT, Bing, DALL-E and so on), explaining that in Xbox many teams are working on how to use these technologies not only within games but also as tools to create games best.
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