Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer was interviewed at last week’s DICE Summit by journalist Stephen Totilo, sharing some noteworthy comments about the future of Xbox and the industry as a whole. He began by saying he’s very confident in the future of Xbox:
It sounds cheesy, but I’ve never been more bullish about where we are. We’re growing on PC. We’re growing on cloud. Our game studios is just an amazing creative organization. We’ve got great support from the company.
We do need to be part of this industry growing. I think that’s got to be a real focus.
At the same time, the Microsoft Gaming executive highlighted the recipe to offset the meager growth of the past year across the industry: finding new players.
I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job finding new players. Let’s pick consoles as a good example: we found 200 million global households that will play console games. And that number really hasn’t changed in the last five, six years.
We’ve raised the price of games. We went through COVID. We found ways of getting more money per player. I think at some point you reach a peak on that, and, frankly, it can go to some places that are manipulative that I’m not a big fan of.
[We need to] find new customers, and you find new customers through new ways of delivering games to players who can’t play those games today, whether that’s devices, whether that’s access, whether that’s the price point of video games.
That strategy fits with the recent announcement made by Microsoft of four former exclusive games launching on other consoles. These will be older games and/or live service games for which Microsoft has deemed necessary to increase the potential user base.
While the games haven’t been announced yet, it is widely believed they are Rare’s Sea of Thieves, Obsidian’s Pentiment and Grounded, and Tango’s Hi-Fi Rush. Some of them might be announced in just a few hours during the Nintendo Partner Showcase.
