The statements in that article don't reflect what Spencer had or had not had a direct hand in prior to him becoming head of operations overseeing the Xbox division. Since becoming the head of operations, however, he's taken full responsibility for everything that has happened since he's head of operations now. He generally doesn't tend to blame past people for past bad decisions because people don't really care about that, they only care about whether the person in charge no is going to take responsibility and address any deficiencies now regardless of whether that person was responsible for deficiencies caused by anyone previously in charge. Also since he was VP of MS Game Studios prior to this, he can't "throw anyone under the bus" regardless of whether or not he disagreed with the direction of 1st party game developement.
Much like what happens in many companies, internal politics are pulled one way or another depending on how well any given person in the organization can persuade the person in charge that X is the direction the company or division of the company (We've seen this at Sony/PlayStation as well as MS/Xbox) should go. In this case, who had more pull with Don Mattrick? Phil Harrison was an incredibly vocal proponent of everything having an integrated online GAAS component and he obviously held more political currency in Xbox at the time compared to other regional directors. This lines up with the direction that Don Mattrick wanted to take things in order to further monetize Xbox WRT integration of Xbox into the living room of everyone on the planet
p a bit of exaggeration). So, his association with Gaikai and belief that the future of gaming was in monetized GAAS gave him far more internal political clout than Phil Spencer. Comments by Spencer that made it to the public prior to becoming head of Xbox in 2014 were extremely rare in comparison.
What we can see is that after being put in charge of MS Gaming is that he was quick to reverse course on all of those initiatives, if he didn't feel they aligned with the market or how he wanted MS gaming to evolve. He obviously couldn't do it immediately as he first had to establish that he was the right person to head the division. So he first stabilized the internal situation within Xbox before tackling the challenge of addression Microsoft's direction WRT 1st party game development with the various 1st party studios that they had at the time.
- Rare was allowed to continue with Sea of Thieves because it was a pet project of theirs that they really wanted to do.
- Scalebound and Fable were cancelled.
- Scalebound was a 3rd party effort while Fable was no longer a tentpole IP.
- Additionally, unlike Sea of Thieves, the Fable devs never really talked passionately about how they wanted to make the game.
- Gears of War 4 was a tentpole IP so couldn't be cancelled or delayed so it had bad microtransactions.
- Gears 5, however, which started development under Phil's watch only had cosmetic microtransactions.
It's interesting to think that Project Xcloud was a carry over from the previous administration, but that couldn't be further from the truth if interviews are to be believed. It wasn't even Phil's idea or anything Phil was thinking about until Kareem Choudhry approached him about it back in 2016. And that idea came to him as a result of work he'd done on his secret Xbox BC project. Up until then Phil had a razor-sharp focus on getting MS 1st party studios to refocus on single player experiences that didn't rely on an online component, regardless of whether or not those games would have an online component.
I have seen people mistakenly take this interview with Phil Spencer to mean that he wants microtransactions in games and wants all games to be GAAS:
Xbox chief: we need to create a Netflix of video games | Xbox | The Guardian
But that's actually about providing a market for games where microtransactions aren't required. A market where single player narrative games can co-exist alongside games as a service. Basically Game Pass where a narrative focused game doesn't have to worry about monetization because more people will play the game if there is less of a barrier (having to purchase the game) between them and playing the game.
Hmmm, I better stop here before I start rambling too much on a sidetrack.
Regards,
SB
