Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer was featured in several interviews last week. In the second half of the chat with Game File’s Stephen Totilo, published over the weekend, the executive said that he’d rather revisit some of Microsoft’s many owned intellectual properties than rely on licensed games any further.
I’m not the biggest fan [of making licensed games]. It creates some complexities for us when we think about putting it in a subscription or streaming it. We’ve seen it in racing games that have to get delisted because you lose certain licenses. So I’m always very careful, if we’re going to take on a license, that we’re doing it for creative reasons, that the team has a goal around what they want to do.
Of course, Microsoft does have two big triple-A licensed games in development at Bethesda’s MachineGames and Arkane Lyon: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Marvel’s Blade, respectively, both of which are IPs owned by Disney. On that partnership, Phil Spencer stated:
I feel great about our partnership with Lucas and Disney. They’ve been good partners. We’re obviously doing Blade with Arkane Lyon with them. I was just out there visiting with that team. I think what you see in Indiana Jones is a team that really loves Indiana Jones and that world. The story is, to me, one of the strongest parts of that game—the way you feel like you’re Indiana Jones from a first person perspective. So it’s clear that’s something they wanted to do. But, for us, given the intellectual property that we have that we own. I’m a big fan of us using the IP that we haven’t even revisited.
It’s not hard to understand why Phil Spencer would feel that way: Disney isn’t known for licensing its prized IPs cheaply. Moreover, Microsoft really does have access to a boatload of unused intellectual properties, from Rare’s beloved Conker and Banjo-Kazooie to Killer Instinct and all the IPs from the latest acquisitions (Bethesda and Activision Blizzard).
Spencer is also known for wearing t-shirts of some of these classic franchises, like Hexen or, more recently, Starcraft, during the Xbox TGS 2024 live broadcast. This gets fans excited about the prospect of reviving those IPs, and today’s comments will undoubtedly fuel more chitchat in the respective communities.
