I don't give any credit to Spencer pre-2018 but I also don't blame him either because he was never the main guy in charge. He always had multiple people above him that simply didn't care about Xbox and wanted to shut it down. Spencer gets credit for keeping Xbox alive, Game Pass which is one of the best innovative ideas in gaming history because he was going against traditional and all this other old, outdated and obsolete shit. Most of all, he gets credit for finally convincing Nadella and their shareholders to invest into Xbox which obviously, they've done by far.
Okay, honest question....what do you think is so innovative about GamePass? Because I don't see it. Is it a good service for the value? Yes. But "innovative"? There's nothing
really innovative about its business model IMO; it's mostly benefited by general technological advances that were not around in the '90s.
Because if you want to talk about innovations in game delivery, both the Sega Channel and Satellaview did what GamePass is doing, decades earlier, with (IMO) more clever technological workarounds considering limitations of the time. And things that MS have since been credited with like cross-buy and game streaming, Sony were doing before them even during the PS3 generation.
Ori and Cuphead were great. Quantum Break was good but not great. Scalebound was fucking trash and should have been cancelled sooner in my opinion. Crackdown 3 went through development hell via multiple studios and to be honest, it should have been cancelled alongside Scalebound. Phantom Dust didn't work out so he cancelled it. If something isn't working, you cancel it and you move on. You don't keep trying to fix it.
Very hard to say Scalebound was trash considering no one got a chance to play it outside of Platinum and maybe some MS people
.
I disagree 100% with you thinking that if Mattrick would have stayed, Xbox would be better. No freaking way. Mattrick WAS the reason (along with Myerson) that Spencer had to convince Nadella to keep Xbox alive. If Mattrick was any good, Spencer wouldn't have been in that position to begin with. Spencer literally resurrected Xbox by convincing Nadella to go all in with gaming.
Mattrick did what he had to do; he was required to push TV TV TV by the whole of Microsoft, that wasn't his choice. Microsoft wanted to utilize Xbox & Kinect for the wider company. Mattrick still landed exclusive content for Xbox during the launch window and helped set up things that would bear fruit when Myerson and even later still Spencer took over.
IMO you should probably be saving most of your animosity for Mattrick and shift that to Myerson.
Even if Bleeding Edge was good, it simply didn't hit or find an audience. If anything, it should have been delayed to the Series X/S launch which is something I would agree with you on. I simply see it as an Overwatch clone that was never doing to do anything especially on an almost dead platform in Xbox One.
Yeah, holding it back for a cross-gen release on Series S & X with obvious next-gen features for those systems would've done a lot for the game IMO.
Exclusive content matters but it's not the end all be all and at launch, it rarely matters. Look at every console that's ever launched. How many can you say launched with an exclusive that was worthing buying the console for day one? Because from my history, I have that listed as 4 consoles all time, 3 of which are Nintendo. SNES/N64/Xbox/Switch. That's literally it. PS5 can't be included because the most popular game Miles was cross-gen and outside of Ray Tracing, what are you really missing? Not much if anything.
Well, there's also the Saturn (in Japan) with Virtua Fighter (sold essentially 1:1 with the console launch there), and for a lot of people the PS1 was worth it for Ridge Racer. But I'm not necessarily jus talking on launch day here, I'm also referring to the launch window which is maybe some 3-6 months post launch-day, typically.
I simply believe that when it comes to launching a console, exclusives are highly overrated because the hardcore fans are going to buy the console day one regardless of what exclusive games are there or not. Exclusives only matter from the halfway point to the end because that's when you'll gain in all the casuals who didn't buy the console day one because they're not the hardcore fans.
There might be some truth to that. However for Xbox Series in particular, I think some strong launch exclusives would have been particularly helpful. This new gen is supposed to be them absolving themselves of the XBO's errors. One of its biggest errors was lack of compelling exclusives. What better way to
SHOW that's being changed than having at least one new big 1P launch game at launch, or a 3P AAA exclusive for the launch or launch window?
My point with XBO was that despite it having good launch exclusives and the better first two plus years of the generation compared to PS4 which only truly had Bloodborne and that's it, it didn't matter did it? If exclusives are so important, consumers/gamers wouldn't have cared about Microsoft's missteps because the games were better.
Exclusives are obviously very important if your system has the lacking 3P titles in terms of performance or features, which was the case with XBO last gen and, eerily, is kind of repeating itself (though less so; it's more trading blows or a back-and-forth now) this generation as well. That's when the role of exclusives increase, because they have to make up for the lacking performance in 3P games or lacking features thereof.
That's what Sony more or less had to do with the PS3, for example, and that played a big part in them being able to edge out 360 in global sales even after a very rough start.
SNES had SMW but it also had an amazing first year which is arguably still the best ever. PS had some great games but that's not why PS dominated. They dominated because Nintendo was a year later and sticking with cartridges while Sega had so much in house fighting and launched a rushed out Saturn at $400. Sony dominated more because both of their competitors fucked up.
Nah; Nintendo & Sega screwed up, for sure, but that was not the main reason PlayStation took off. Otherwise, every non-Nintendo or Sega console of that period would have done extremely well, but only PlayStation became a success.
Sony benefited from Sega being arrogant and messy, and Nintendo being arrogant & late, but ultimately it was Sony being able to provide a solution the larger customer market deemed superior in pricing value, game library, quality, and marketing, and doing so
consistently, why they were able to succeed. They still had to put in the work, and that constituted the majority of the foundation for their success.
