Phil Spencer Says Xbox Needs “Better Games That More People Can Play”

Xbox is the only console maker to be present at the gamescom this week, and the Xbox team intends to make its time at the annual trade show count. Yesterday, the gamescom Opening Night Live livestream included a couple of Xbox news and reveals, and the Xbox team followed up today with a first daily stream from the Xbox booth, new accessibility accessories, and pre-orders for the all-digital Xbox Series X and the 2TB Special Edition model.

Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming also made an appearance alongside Xbox President Sarah Bond during Xbox’s first daily stream from the gamescom show floor. And the Xbox exec didn’t avoid the elephant in the room, which is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle coming to PlayStation just a couple of months after its release on Xbox and PC on December 9, 2024.

Since yesterday, a lot of Xbox enthusiasts have pointed out Phil Spencer’s previous statements from February when Microsoft announced that four Xbox-exclusive games were coming to PlayStation and Nintendo consoles. At this time, Spencer explicitly said that these first four games wouldn’t include Starfield and the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. However, if you read between the lines, Spencer never actually said that that would never be the case.

Still, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has been marketed as Xbox and PC exclusive until yesterday, and Microsoft needs strong exclusive games to drive Xbox console sales and Game Pass subscriptions. However, by announcing the PS5 release of the game so early, the company may once again alienate its console user base and kill any momentum for the Xbox ecosystem.

Phil Spencer, however, doesn’t seem to be worried: The exec pointed out today that the Xbox player base has kept growing after Microsoft released four of its games on other consoles. The CEO of Microsoft Gaming also emphasized that to continue to receive the same amount of support from Microsoft, the Xbox division needs to deliver strong results.

“What I see when I look is that our franchises are getting stronger, our Xbox console players are as high this year as they’ve ever been,” Spencer said. “So I look at it and I say, our player numbers are going up for the console platform, our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been, and we run a business. And it’s definitely true inside of Microsoft that the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing in terms of what we’re able to go do.”

It’s no secret that the sales of Xbox consoles have been cratering in recent quarters, with Xbox hardware revenue being down 41% in Q2 2024. And even though Xbox consoles may have been outsold by the PS5 by almost 3:1 last year, the Xbox console userbase can still continue to grow as Xbox Series X|S consoles find new customers and people on Xbox One continue to use their consoles.

However, the Xbox and PC userbase probably isn’t big enough to make the development of a game like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which is based on a very popular licensed IP, financially sustainable. That’s why Sony has also started releasing more of its PlayStation-exclusive games on PC, with God of War Ragnarök being next in line in September. While it’s highly doubtful that Sony will ever start releasing some of its PlayStation-exclusive games on Xbox, Spencer still believes that the video games industry needs to rethink its approach regarding game exclusivity.

“The last thing I’ll probably say is I think as an industry right now, there’s a lot of pressure on the industry,” Spencer said. “It’s been growing for a long time and now people are looking for ways to grow. And I think for us as fans and players of games, we just have to anticipate there’s going to be more change in how some of the more traditional ways that games were built and distributed, that’s going to change for all of us. But the end result has to be better games that more people can play. If we’re not focused on that, I think we’re focused on the wrong things.”

Spencer’s comments are pretty much in line with what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said about exclusive games at a federal court hearing last year. “The dominant player there has defined market competition using exclusives, so that’s the world we live in. I have no love for that world,” Nadella explained at the time.