Xbox has walked the walk of Spencer’s talk of bringing gaming to everyone.
But Spencer would only get bolder as the Xbox Series era unfolded. Microsoft
spent $7.5 billion and bought Bethesda/ZeniMax, which included Todd Howard’s Bethesda Game Studios, Doom developer id Software, Dishonored’s Arkane, and more. And then they spent SIXTY-NINE BILLION DOLLARS to
pick up the whole of Activision-Blizzard-King, which includes Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush. The purchase price dwarfs the
previous largest video game industry acquisition ever by a factor of five, triggering
regulatory challenges in multiple countries before the deal was ultimately approved and finalized. Unfortunately, thanks in part to the pandemic and also to the ever-growing incubation time needed to make AAA games, players still have yet to see a steady flow of first-party games despite all of these larger and smaller acquisitions.
And so I would argue that Phil Spencer’s first decade as the top man at Xbox can be summed up this way: a gamer-first focus on great services like backwards compatibility and Xbox Game Pass that hasn’t quite yet delivered a consistent quantity and quality of first-party games, though the future looks incredibly bright no matter where and how you like to play. As for the next ten years? Personally, I’m incredibly excited, as Spencer has shown that, above all else, he puts players first and he’s not afraid to spend money to build out Xbox Game Studios. Soon there will be a never-ending wave of first-party games in any genre you could ask for, all available as part of your Xbox Game Pass subscription, and you might even be able to play them
on the go too. Here’s to the next decade of Xbox.
