Phil Spencer underperformed for 10+ years and yet he’s still there.
Must be nice having the peace of mind that no matter how you fuck up, other people will pay in your stead.
I recently randomly came across a youtube channel of someone criticizing Phil Spencer…
…who in that very video, described herself as an Ex-MSFT executive producer for multiple failed or non successful games in the early 00’s, but blamed the failures on everyone else around her.
These people have literally zero self awareness.
They have absurdly massive egos and senses of entitlement, they all do exactly what they criticize other people for.
Would you mind sharing a link? Piqued my interest
Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.
Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69gs773bZRI
And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IM11RtGLJ8
Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, and you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…
So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?
Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?
What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?
To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:
You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.
All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.
Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.
Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.
When your predecessor was Don Mattrick, it’s not like you have to perform that great to be better.
They need Peter Moore back, he’s the only leader of Xbox/Microsoft Games that’s ever been any good - he took Xbox from zero to its peak golden age, then he left and we got the dark age of Kinect.
Not sure why companies try to push mobile games like that so fucking hard. Just because everyone has a phone doesn’t mean everyone wants to play games on them.
Also doesn’t help that practically all mobile games like that are created with the intention to focus on microtransactions and grindy paywalled and timegated content.
Can’t say anything of value was lost with sacking studios/devs for this kind of crap. It would only be better if it were the higher-ups coming up with this garbage for once.
Not sure why companies try to push mobile games like that so fucking hard. Just because everyone has a phone doesn’t mean everyone wants to play games on them.
Mobile games make more revenue than PC and console gaming combined. Of course companies are gonna try to get a bigger and bigger piece of that pie.
They’re not games, they’re money-generators disguised as games!
There are at least two other mobile games in the same genre that did very well, so this one wasn’t a stretch.
Playing first person shooter on a mobile phone sounds like literally the worst possible experience. You need physical controls for accuracy touch screens are terrible for that plus of course you’re obscuring a good chunk of the screen with your fingers.
There are a few good mobile games, although I admit not many, but the good ones work with the limitations of the medium rather than trying to simply brute force through them. Good ones include things like Hitman Go, Threes, And a fairly possible Eve Online mobile game, which was only really let down by being Eve Online.
Diablo Immortal made a depressing amount of money.
Us sweats mean nothing when there’s a billion dollars on the table for them.
And this isn’t even a edgecase. Even Bethesda/Nintendo saw their mobile games print money more than their regular games. Fortunately they have souls and think about their core audience.
This is the thing I don’t get. Long-Term they will make way more money if their mobile games are good otherwise they get a reputation for putting out crap and overall less interest the next time around. The best long-term strategy would be to put in effort, especially when the return is so good.
