‘Great games’ won’t help Xbox beat PlayStation or Nintendo says Microsoft

PS5 and Xbox Series X controllers — Is Phil Spencer talking sense or not? (pic: Metro.co.uk)

There’s more to Phil Spencer’s recent comments than just an apology for Redfall, as he explains why Starfield reviewing well won’t help Xbox.

If Sony had suffered as disastrous a launch as the one for Redfall you can bet that Jim Ryan would not be appearing on podcasts to apologise and to try and explain what went wrong. Especially not after having had such bad news in terms of console sales and the Activision Blizzard acquisition.

Phil Spencer deserves full credit for doing just that, as he discussed the events of the last two weeks, including a direct apology for the state of Redfall.

However, when you listen to the full interview, he does say some rather strange things, including the statement that Xbox is ‘not in the business of out consoling Sony and Nintendo.’

‘I see commentary that if you just built great games everything would turn around. It’s just not true that if we go off and build great games then all of a sudden, you’re going to see console share shift in some dramatic way,’ said Spencer on the Kinda Funny Xcast.

That seems a very disingenuous comment, considering that Microsoft’s most successful generation, with the Xbox 360, was when its first party studios were at their peak. Not only that but the failure of the PlayStation 3 was largely due to a lack of games early on, with Nintendo’s various failures also coinciding with downturns with the quality of their software output.

‘We lost the worst generation to lose in the Xbox One generation, where everybody built their digital library of games, he said. ‘This idea that if we just focused more on great games on our console, that somehow we’re going to win the console race, I think doesn’t really lay into the reality of most people.’

Digital libraries certainly haven’t be very important to the Switch’s success, since it’s not backwards compatible with any other console, with Nintendo instead relying on the quality of their games and the ingenuity of their hardware.

‘I see a lot of pundits out there that kind of want to go back to the time where we all had cartridges and discs and every new generation was a clean slate and you could switch the whole console share,’ says Spencer.

‘That’s just not the world that we are in today. There is no world where Starfield is an 11 out of 10 and people start selling their PS5, that’s not going to happen.’

This also doesn’t seem to make much sense, since we can think of no one that has ever made that argument and if Starfield were to get a 11 out of 10 it may not have people selling their PlayStation 5s, but it would certainly see more people than now buying Xbox Series X and S consoles.

Spencer also made oblique references to Sony having exclusive deals that were somehow more important to their success than anything Microsoft could sign up.

As usual, he didn’t name any specific games, but it’s hard to imagine having the Silent Hill 2 remake as a timed exclusive makes that much difference to anyone.