Phil SpencerCEO of Video Games at Microsoft and Director Xbox, seems to have entered a phase of excess honesty in the wake of the brutal hit that Redfall, the latest video game developed by Arkane, has taken. The boss and visible face of Xbox took part in the podcast Kinda Funny Games, in which he made a series of rather surprising statements regarding competition with Sony PlayStation and Nintendo.

Phil Spencer was asked if Xbox as a video game division has stopped paying enough attention to consoles to focus too much on PC. The executive responded by saying that Microsoft would be wrong to think that simply making great video games could make the Xbox surpass Sony and Nintendo.

Spencer emphasized that his company has since followed a different strategy than the Japanese giants in the industry Microsoft is more focused on allowing developers to allow their customers to play from any device or screen. On the other hand, he acknowledges that Xbox consoles have a tough time compared to their rivals: “There’s really no great solution or victory for us. And I know it’s going to piss off a lot of people, but the truth is, when you’re third in the console market and the top two players are so strong, and in certain cases they have a very low-key approach to business and things, they make it difficult for us as a team to be an Xbox. That depends on us and no one else.”

“I see comments that if you make great games, everything would change. It’s just not true that if we go make great games, you’re suddenly going to see a dramatic change in console sharing.. We lost the worst generation we could have lost in the Xbox One generation where everyone built their digital library of games. So when you go and build on Xbox, we want to make our Xbox community feel amazing, but the idea that if we focus more on great games on our console that we’re somehow going to win the console race, I don’t think that’s really true for most people.”

Phil Spencer rightly points out that creating great Xbox exclusives may not be the silver bullet that will propel Microsoft’s console division up. However, with Metacritic data in mind, it’s no less true that the two top-performing IP brands, Halo and Gears of War, have dropped considerably compared to some of the Sony and Nintendo exclusives that have managed to hold their own against niche critics, second to none. side is increasingly being questioned, especially when it comes to some gems in the scene India.

Microsoft already had a lot more than Halo, Gears of War and Forza Horizon before buying Zenimax, because they own what was one of the best video game developers of the 1990s, Rare. But you can see that Microsoft took over Rare not so much with the intention of feeding the Xbox catalog as with annoying Nintendo. In fact, some executives from the Redmond giant believed they had taken over Donkey Kong, which of course is far from the truth.

While Donkey Kong was effectively a borrowed IP, Rare developed a significant number of IPs that they still retain, but most of them don’t fit the Xbox user profile. Then again, there’s the fact that Perfect Dark, which became one of the biggest juggernauts in video game history when it was released in 2000 for the Nintendo 64, has been sitting in a drawer for over a decade. half, yet it’s a license that fits the Xbox user profile on paper.

Another interesting statement from Phil Spencer is that for him, many experts and perhaps even the Japanese competition have an outdated vision of the industry: “I see a lot of pundits wanting to go back to the days when we all had cartridges and discs and each new generation was a clean slate and you could change the entire proportion of the console. That is not the world we live in today. There is no world where Starfield is 11 out of 10 and people start selling their PS5s, it’s not going to happen“.

Phil Spencer’s comments suggest that Xbox as a video game division could focus more on services and PC and less on consoles. It smacks a little like the company is starting to accept defeat on consoles in order to focus their efforts on the areas where they are strongest.