Phil Spencer is exiting Microsoft as AI executive takes over Xbox | Hacker News Reader

Phil Spencer is exiting Microsoft as AI executive takes over Xbox

neowin.net

99 pointsbundie89 comments

Was he really that bad? Wasn't the predecessor dude the guy who said something along the lines of "all games will require an Internet connection, you cavemen" or something along those lines?

Yes.

One of very recent examples: handheld Xbox.

There are rumors about upcoming handheld Xbox. Many like the idea

It is announced, marketed as handheld Xbox (asus xbox ally x). Quite expensive, but okay.

After some time (!) they reveal that this handheld Xbox actually won’t play your Xbox games/subscription. It will play your pc subscription and pc games. Wtf

Literally about time when the sales of the device actually start, Microsoft racks up the price of Xbox ultimate from $20 to $30 per month. They unsubscribe page is overloaded.

How any coherent management would allow this?

Xbox has been languishing badly and Microsoft games in general have not been doing very well over the past decade despite gaming becoming completely mainstream so one might suspect that he is being retired rather than retiring. Yes, he was better than Mattrick but that was a very, very low bar to clear.

I will give Spencer a bit of credit though for bringing back Microsoft Flight Simulator.

2020 yes. 2024 on PS5 IMO was a waste of money. The problem is they both require tons of computing power to run smoothly and look good.

I want to agree but I don't see the greener grass at all. Please bear in mind that this is totally anecdotal.

I own all three major consoles. My PS5 has been switched on about six times since I purchased it at the time the PSVR2 was released. Is it because I'm not into the funky and weird JRPG titles or am I just sold to the Xbox ecosystem? I play Xbox almost every single day. My PS5 is just using up space and for two titles which didn't fully grip me (Horizon and The Last of Us).

What am I missing here? Is the answer PC/Steam?

I haven’t looked at the specifics but it’s seemed to me that for years anything that came out on Xbox also came out on PC on the same date, and the PC has titles that aren’t on either Xbox or PS5. There are a lot of games that come out on PS5 and then either never come to PC or there’s a year+ delay. Thats why I have a PC and a PS5 and haven’t considered buying an Xbox for a long time.

You're sold to the Xbox ecosystem.

All Xbox games are available on PS5. You can play Forza Horizon just fine on PS5 but Ghost of Yotei is never coming to Xbox. Microsoft had to do this because Xbox sales are dismal (below Xbox One) and they're being outsold 3:1.

I'm probably sold as you said. There's no Halo on PS5, there's no Gears either. Not much into racing games so wouldn't know.

Ghosts of...Yes, I agree. I still need to get through the first one.

I still think I'm one of those outliers who isn't into games with cartoony graphics and titles like:

" Re:Coded Genesis — Moonlight Ephemera & The Seven-Fold Path of the Crimson Paradox: Definitive Resonance Edition"

(Disclaimer: I used AI to generate that ridiculous title and I think it's funny)

Edit: Daid -> Said

> There's no Halo on PS5, there's no Gears either.

There's Gears Reloaded, and the upcoming Halo remake will be on PS5.

Microsoft already announced Halo is coming to PS5. There are no more Xbox-exclusive games.

Funky and weird JRPG titles and games with cartoony graphics and ridiculous titles are (a) a small percentage of the PlayStation library given that >99% of games are cross-platform, (b) not nearly global enough in their appeal or sales figures to make any disinterested persons the outliers, and (c) in my experience, many of them also release on Xbox, Switch, and/or PC.

I own no consoles and am neutral on JRPGs and cartoony graphics, so I have no skin in this game. But you seem oddly focused on writing off a functionally identical piece of hardware based on the existence of one particular genre that doesn't interest you.

Sounds like the GP still has the mentality of the PS2/late PS1 era, where JRPG with cartoony graphics were indeed the big trend and pushing force of gaming.

But that very abruptly ended with the PS3, between development costs ballooning and shutting down many longstanding studios, trends shifting to chase open world or the blossoming online FPS genre, a shift of Japanese developers towards "global appeal", and the extremely slow start of the PS3 as a viable console to sell for.

Any JRPG studios surviving past that purge are the stragglers, not the trendsetters. And every company has their battle scars from that time. Final fantasy development exploded in budget, the "Tales of" series coasted along (fans would call it the "call of duty of JRPGs"), Atlus had to be bought out by Sega to survive (and fortunately, thrive), Monolith broke off of Bandai Namco and went to Nintendo, and so many more stories. Falcom seems to be the only one who simply cruised on by, which speaks to how lean and consistent their development cycle was.

When did the last new Gears and Halo games come out again? 5+ years ago? That's what Xbox has, historic exclusives. Gears 1 Reloaded came to PS5, Halo: Campaign Evolved is coming to PS5. All the big recent Xbox games have either come to PS5 or are coming. Indiana Jones, Avowed, Flight Simulator 2024, Forza Horizon 5, etc. Then you have to remember most everything else but Halo 5 and a few Gears games were already on PC too.

The only reason to keep an Xbox these days is for your existing library.

I truly don’t understand how they bought so many legendary studios and haven’t come up with anything great from any of them.

Yeah, there was a nice youtube documentary about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYCYHKOChA4

MS appointing someone with no game experience isn't a good sign, but to be expected at this point. Gamers abandoned the platform and I don't expect it to survive much longer.

That documentary looks like it pulled content from Microsoft's own commissioning of a documentary (an excellent one where they pull no punches on the mistakes they made). While most of it focused on the original Xbox going into 360 the last episode discusses the Xbox One years

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1h--43R8Oo&list=PL0il2l-B_W...

The one where they downplayed bumpgate?

God I wish I could just block throwaway accounts sometimes.

Since your snark indicates that you clearly have watched the documentary that I am referring to here is the youtube captions of the relevant segment:

"In order to fix this problem, breakthrough came when we understood that the connections that were being broken were not located on the motherboard but they're actually located inside the components. The problem was a connection was breaking. The reason it was breaking was thermal, but it wasn't because of the peak temperature; is because when the unit would get hot and then cold, hot and then cold, every time it did that would stress the connection. All these people loved playing video games, so they would turn this thing on and off, and when it would turn on and off you get all sorts of stresses, and just like when you you bend something too many times till it finally breaks, that's what was happening."

Lets put aside that of the million plus people watching RIP Felix's "research" only a handful of people actually have the technical expertise to confirm or deny his thesis. Regardless of if his "research" is valid or not, his video is not exactly a mass market documentary like the Microsoft one was. The caption above does a good job of generally explaining the issue to normies and then moving on because you know they have like 18 years of history to cover. Its only a small cadre of weirdos that like to take this ~30 seconds of footage and blow it out of proportion.

If you have additional information not in the public domain feel free to share it.

No, Phil was quite a good exec I believe, but he was dealt a bad hand and never really was able to play his way out of it. I also think he was hamstrung by Microsoft leadership outside of Xbox and the general push toward AI. There were some issues under his leadership. Notably game quality and timeliness languished under his tenure.

Phil was a terrible exec who confused buying things for growth. The ABK acquisition was a disaster. He wanted to buy Nintendo and valve too. They gave him all the cash he wanted and he just lit it on fire.

Virtually all of Microsoft Gaming revenue growth over the last few years has come from the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard.

Strangely I thought Phil Spencer was doing a lot of good for the Xbox brand, minus some of the recent price gouging.

I certainly think he's good at branding but very poor execution during his reign.

Both Playstation and Nintendo Switch significantly exceeded xbox in terms of good games in the last decade imo.

It seems like Sony and Nintendo had more high-quality exclusives (though mostly timed exclusives for Sony), which are system sellers, while most Xbox games were also available on Windows.

But the Xbox hardware is good, franchises like Halo / Gears / Forza etc. have always been good, and Xbox Game Pass is great.

I wouldn't say he mismanaged but clearly his strategy wasn't working, although I'm not sure if there was a path to a better outcome.

The problem was the lack of hit IPs, and buying a bunch of studios with good histories like Bethesda was on the surface, a logical choice. The problem is that the Western AAA industry was also undergoing through a general decline amidst a larger cultural shift that was anathemic to originality, so no new hits could be made.

Nintendo and Sony in contrast still had a portfolio of more niche legacy studios like Monolith or Atlus or Kojima that could create new things. Obviously the talent for that does exist in the West, from Larian or smaller indie studios, but it is very hard for upper management to discern these kinds of details or be willing to take the risk with them.

He oversaw a lot of good things. Recently he's been in "admit defeat and dissolve the brand" mode. To me this has smelled like a "my hands are tied and someone above me is making bad decisions" path, but I don't have anything to justify that other than it doesn't make sense to absolutely fold when it's your name on the line and it's the brand you've spent your life building.

Sure, but they pretty conclusively lost, and it would likely require a major fumble by Sony to change that. So I'm not sure what they're supposed to do?

Loss is admitting defeat when you have a mature hardware team, decades of fans, and a brand that was born from, and reached its heights, from really connecting with what people want. That's fertile ground that got doused in salt. At some point you just have to admit that people don't want what they don't want. No reality distortion field will make people want crap games made without love bloated to the gills in microtransactions. Microsoft would rather shut the whole thing down than admit that though.

Was it really profitable when it was doing things fans did want? The original console was a massive loss and a mess because they didn't know what they were doing. The 360 gave them a few good years but in the end the ended the cycle in second place yet again. Afterwards it was years of being distant third. Will Microsoft ever recoup that investment? The only good years they had were because their competitor stumbled momentarily. How good was the brand when they never really made inroads into asia?

(I say all this as someone enamoured with the first console as it was a core moment of my upbringing)

Of course it was. The proof is in the pudding. You don't go from a skunkworks program to a major division without profit. Selling millions of consoles and games for hundreds of dollars with healthy margins is a printing press. The issue is while searching for making the printing press to have ever growing margins you squeeze the soul out of the product and make it so your customers leave. Optimizing for 3 months out kills you in 24 months. This is textbook enshittification. It is very obvious when it's happening and it should be very obvious when looked back on.

It was xbox yesterday, it's Windows today. Microsoft is on the way out.

I'm not so sure. Your comment is based on assumption that all they needed to do was launch the thing and then its free riding there. This is developing an entire platform we are talking about.

The original console cost a billion dollars to produce(confirmed in the documentary here: https://youtu.be/yT_i6hXf9WU?list=PL0il2l-B_WwadxfTkK3-NLoYN... ).

There are xbox engineers confirmed reading these forums so maybe some of them can shed some light but it seemed like the first console was a dud for multiple reasons and they killed it off early. Why would they do that if it was making money?

The second console was on its way to being a blockbuster until the RROD issue cost them at least a confirmed billion dollars in losses(also mentioned in the documentary here: https://youtu.be/z2d6IMBS8oY?list=PL0il2l-B_WwadxfTkK3-NLoYN... ).

So thats a confirmed negative two billion dollars and we haven't even talked about the cost to develop 360.

Sony caught up to them after RROD and managed to turn PS3 around so 360 didn't even end the cycle as number one in sales. After that, they never had any real success again and continued to fall further behind until today.

> So I'm not sure what they're supposed to do?

Continue to provide value and win over customers?

He actually understood games, but somehow Xbox always seemed mismanaged.

The 360 era was good and they were really trying. For the last 10 years I don’t even know what Xbox stands for at this point. Like gamepass is a neat SaaS and the consoles are meh and PC gaming went it’s own way a long time ago and is at a healthy place

360 also benefited from PS3 issues (unusual architecture that was hard to program effectively, high price ). GamePass is great, and the Xbox hardware is good, but PS4 and PS5 had stronger timed exclusives while Switch had an appealing combination of Nintendo first-party exclusives (several of them rising from the ashes of the Wii U), lower cost, and handheld/hybrid operation.

Good riddance. Unfortunately with the length of dev cycles his successor is inheriting such a mess that he’ll have target on his back from day one.

Seems like his successor does not have much of a plan either.

> In another internal email addressing staff, the new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma gave some hints as to how the future of Xbox will look.

She outlined three commitments: "First, great games." "Second, the return of Xbox." and "Third, future of play." She went on to say that the company will continue to invest in its franchises and studios, keep Xbox spreading across platforms to reduce barriers, while also inventing "business models and new ways to play."

Sounds like a concept of a plan. I was always an Xbox person instead of PlayStation, I was part of the Xbox Live beta and had so many great memories from that era. After the lack of exclusives on the Xbox Series X, their game pass shenanigans, and the horrible UX decisions over the years, the Xbox brand is trash to me. Same with Halo, what a freaking waste of an IP.

> Sounds like a concept of a plan.

It's safe to assume that her first e-mail to staff is not going to include a comprehensive breakdown of every action she plans to take.

Not saying she does or doesn't know what she's doing, but it would be weird if she went into much more detail at this point before she's even ramped up.

Would be good to provide clarity to the trenches though.

Clarity would be "you're all fired" but they cant write that, can they.

> keep Xbox spreading across platforms to reduce barriers

Read: we're not going to do console exclusives and instead we may not even make an Xbox anymore, and instead put the Xbox brand on PCs.

That's what Xbox has already been doing. New "Xbox" games run best on PS5 Pro (for consoles at least). I don't think there's a single Xbox Series exclusive, everything is on PC or some other console now.

> New "Xbox" games run best on PS5 Pro (for consoles at least).

I dunno, the way Windows 11 is going these days that caveat is getting a lot of scrutiny. I would say that, in many cases, they run best on PS5 Pro full stop - at least until the GabeCube releases, for those who can afford it.

Yep. There are no exclusives anymore, not even timed ones. Those releases that aren't Day 1 on Playstation now is only because they were too far along in development to make that happen. This is part of their "Everything is an XBox" mantra, giving people pretty much zero incentive to buy XBox hardware right now.

The “everything is an Xbox” line they’ve been repeating is embarrassing. Did SEGA drag it out this long when they threw in the towel?

Reads like the standard Nadella special, they probably share the same copilot template

it's clear they are going to continue gutting the place and spin it off

Except that Satya whined about people using the term "AI slop" and Sharma specifically uses that term in her e-mail. An interesting contradiction.

To be fair, that is a great social engineering technique to trying an win back the market.

I'll take it as a social engineering technique because that is the sector she came from and still being pushed by the CEO.

Her press release and tweets sound like someone asked AI what to say to make Xbox fans like you. I tested what it would tell me to say if I was CEO and it gave me very similar talking points.

AI slop. They're winding down the business.

His successor seems to have zero experience in the industry

It feels that they’ve finally got understanding that Xbox is total mess and try? To reboot completely. Because “Xbox president” seemingly is booted too

> Alongside him, Xbox President Sarah Bond is also exiting the company, who many suspected would be Spencer's successor in leading Xbox.

Phil Spencer entered with Xbox in a total mess and he was never really able to get them out of the mess.

I like Phil as CEO of Microsoft. I think Microsoft's corporate strategy never really made sense for Microsoft and I think Microsoft has a massive and worsening culture problem. It seems like leadership fail upwards, which tells me that at the executive and junior executive level the job is internal politics.

His successor looks like a mess to the gaming section.

At least Phil Spencer knew something about games.

They promoted the person who was in charge of overseeing studios, so ostensibly not much will change on that front.

From reading tea leaves, I’m fairly convinced Microsoft sees streaming games as the future of Xbox.

There’s a clear line from AI to that when you consider how many slightly outdated but not useless GPUs will be in Microsoft data centres within the next couple years.

Microsoft can really get it wrong, but getting streaming wrong after Stadia and Luna would be very, very impressive.

Since the A100 the x00 series GPUs dont have the ability to run graphics drivers. The hardware is optimized for FP8 and not much else. That's how they've gotten 'faster' for AI workloads, by dumping graphics.

I'll be honest my initial read of the headline caused me th think they were have MS Copilot act as the new head of Xbox, not the person taking over Xbox used to be the guy in charge of an AI product.

Would it make a difference?

How do we know Asha is not AI. She certainly looks the part.

Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/phil-spencer-retiring-sarah-bon... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47093723)

Under Phil they spent 69 billion acquiring Activision with what looked like a big move against Sony only to give up exclusivity to titles like Halo and Forza and game pass going from a budget friendly option to a premium subscription. Basically they went from having some moat to just throwing in the towel.

What a glorious clickbait title.

I for one welcome our new AI executives, oh lame it's a fallible C suite human again, all hail the monolith!

I also fell for it.

I was disappointed to learn that a human was taking over and not Skynet

Eagerly awaiting my new CopilotBox Zero 360 dotnet.

Spin off Xbox, it’s horrible as a neglected division.

I found this quote from the AI executive slightly reassuring:

"As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop," Sharma added. "Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us."

While I'm sad to see someone who's been with the company for so long leave, it's undeniable that the Xbox brand has really faltered under his watch

Yeah, that's a great thing to hear? At the end of the day it's all exec speak, but it softens the blow of the title a little.

People say a lot, especially when it benefits them in the moment to tell people what they want to hear.

"I guarantee that you won't need to log into your Facebook account every time you wanna use the Oculus Rift." — Palmer Luckey (2014)

"No advertising coming onto Netflix. Period." — Reed Hastings, Netflix co-CEO (2019)

"Read my lips: no new taxes." — George H.W. Bush (1988 Republican National Convention)

"I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." — Franklin D. Roosevelt (October 1940 Campaign Speech)

"If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what." - President Barack Obama (June 15, 2009, AMA Speech)

"I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them." — Donald Trump (July 5, 2024)

how did Obama break that promise? i don't recall people having to change plans? i know you have to have a health care plan but if you already have one, did Obamacare force you to change it?

It didn't force people to change insurers, it forced insurers to change their policies, which ended in about 4 million people getting cancellation notices.

Even Obama later admitted it was a lie and apologized for it. It was NPR's lie of the year.

https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+admits+lie+health+plan...

Yeah hence the "slightly" in my comment. At least it seems like they understand understand the problem, even if they may change their mind in the future

> Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Not a lie or broken promise because it wasn't a foreign war. WW2 came to America's doorstep. The first American battle of the war was fought on US soil.

Correct, specifically the Territory of Hawaii, which America had annexed 60 years earlier but not yet made a state.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/does-someone-here-know-how-th...

Can we take a look at this post? she was replaced by someone who climbed ranks while destroying everything she touched, is is purely because she is Indian? what is going on in America?

That's a good post but we don't even need this post to tell of her incredible power of smashing great things. I wish to see her in the next Shehulk movie.

A lady full of word salads was the vice president of united states for 4 years. Was then even nominated to be a president. No different here. America has been ruined.

It took MS this long to yeet the incompetent Phil from the corp... sigh. The problem is, MS was never good in nurturing creatives. Why would anything change?

wow, end of an era

Next up: Executive AI takes over from AI executive

Now it will play video games for me. Great!

Xbox isn’t doing very well so of course it’s now up to a woman to clean up the mess. I don’t envy the position that Asha has landed in, especially with how much misogyny exists in the gaming subculture.

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