#362: Gank Spencer

Closing out yesterday's edition, on Sony’s sudden and staggeringly daft closure of Bluepoint Games, I said this about PlayStation co-CEO Hermen Hulst:

“Like Spencer, he has only himself to blame. Like Spencer, he is one of the few people in the industry with the power to change it for the better, yet appears only to be able to make it worse. And like Spencer, I hope to see him one day fired out of a cannon — literally, ideally, but at this point I'll take what I can get. It is becoming increasingly urgent.”

A few hours later, Microsoft announced Phil Spencer’s retirement; his last day is on Monday. Are the people that matter finally paying heed to Hit Points? Is this the start of my #thoughtleader era? Do I need to get back on LinkedIn? God, let’s hope not. Worst website on the internet, and it’s not even close.

Spencer will be joined on his way out the door by Sarah Bond, who resigned her position as Xbox president yesterday. This is even more surprising a development than Spencer’s departure, since Bond has for years carried the air of heir apparent. It certainly seems plausible enough that Bond would resent being passed over for the top job and decide to walk, particularly since the credentials of Spencer’s replacement, Asha Sharma, seem a bit, erm, suspect. (A former VP of Meta and COO of Instacart, whatever that is, she’s only been at Microsoft for two years, serving as president of, yikes and uh-oh, CoreAI.) But who knows. People have been pointing to a LinkedIn post from Bond, sent a few hours before the news broke, which gave the impression things were very much business-as-usual chez Xbox. But it might have been scheduled in advance; either way I doubt Bond herself was at the keyboard for it. I certainly hope that people of this seniority, in this big and powerful a company, do not spend their days posting? Who knows. If the president of the United States can find the time for it, I suppose all bets are off.

Anyway! Hit Points has, to put it mildly, been no fan of Phil Spencer over the last few years. But as he saunters off, snowboard under one arm and sixteen of his favourite game-logo T-shirts under the other, for the final time I thought we should give him his dues before we consider where it all fell apart. Things did look pretty good for Xbox under his auspice for a while.

He did a commendable job of salvaging the wreckage of the Xbox One left by his predecessor, Don Mattrick. The Xbox One X closed the yawning power delta between the launch console and PS4, and even took a slight lead, on paper if not in practice, over PS4 Pro. The backwards-compatibility initiative rewarded platform loyalty and quietly set a new industry standard: being able to play your old games on your new console is now a basic expectation. He was a driving force in the breaking down of the industry’s old walls, striving in both public and private to make cross-platform multiplayer the norm.

And while, as we will discuss in a moment, Xbox’s wanton acquisition spree would ultimately set Spencer’s downfall in motion, for a while there things looked so good, so coherent, so smart. Microsoft bought Minecraft for what now looks like a song, let Mojang get on with things with minimal corporate interference, and it went from strength to strength. The purchases of, among others, Double Fine and Obsidian gave studios who were only ever one failure away from bankruptcy a financial safety net and creative freedom. Even the ZeniMax acquisition, for all the eyebrows raised at the $7.5bn pricetag — gosh, that seems quaint now — made sense for a company that was trying to build an irresistible, all-you-can-eat subscription service, and knew it could only do so with a ready supply of desirable, high-profile games.

Throughout it all, even when things went bad, Spencer clearly understood games as a medium, a profession, and a business. Having an Actual Game Guy at the top of a big gaming company is far rarer than it should be, and while there was a lot of facade to Spencer — particularly towards the end, when he used faux-candour and his gaming credentials to try to mask the godawful shitfest he had spawned — I imagine this is the aspect of him we will come to miss the most. Heartening though it is to at last see a woman in the big chair in this most historically blokey of industries, I do not see much in Asha Sharma’s track record to suggest things are about to get better. (And that’s before we get into all the birthrater stuff.)

So, yeah. Phil was a good bloke, and he did some good stuff. I believe his heart was in the right place right up until the end — but unfortunately for him, and the rest of us, Microsoft these days is no place for hearts. Let’s have a quick look at the three big moments where, to my mind, it all went wrong for Phil Spencer.

In fact, let’s stick a paywall in. Sorry, I hardly ever do this, but it’s Saturday and I’m working and that seems wrong somehow. It’s 50% off for your first month...