Xbox boss Phil Spencer never misses an opportunity to speak publicly, and at Gamescom today he’s been chatting as part of an official livestream. Asked specifically about his company’s decision to bring Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to PS5, after subsidiary Bethesda renegotiated its license with Disney to exclude Sony’s system, he admitted there’s a lot of pressure on the industry to find new growth vectors – and he suggested things will change for all platform holders.
“What I see when I look is that our franchises are getting stronger [and] our Xbox console players are as high this year as they’ve ever been,” he claimed. “So, I look at it, and I say, ‘Okay, 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. Like, 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. We get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing in what we’re able to go and do.”
Xbox has been on an unprecedented spending spree over the past five or so years, burning close to $100 billion on multiple publishers and game developers. While it doesn’t declare the numbers, it’s also expected to have spent large sums of money on Xbox Game Pass, which it claims is sustainable but has had a demonstrable impact on software sales.
“I think as an industry right now, there’s a lot of pressure. It’s been growing for a long time and now people are looking for new ways to grow,” he continued. “I think for us, as players and as fans, we just have to anticipate there’s going to be more change in how some of the ‘traditional’ ways 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, then we’re focused on the wrong thing.”