Microsoft Phil Spencer Interview

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As the boss of Microsoft Game Studios, Phil Spencer has a pretty big say in what you play on your Xbox 360.

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From the Microsoft exclusives such as Gears of War 2 and Fable II through to the exciting new technology of the future in Project Natal, Phil Spencer is one of the guiding hands helping mould the future of Microsoft's console.

Who better to talk to about what to expect next from Microsoft? OXM caught up with Phil Spencer during the madness of E3 to grab a few words about all things Xbox 360...



Was Natal a big part of the conference from the word go? Something you've been waiting to show?
Yeah. It's all something we've worked on for quite a while. And I've said before that I'm not a fan about us coming out and talking about stuff unless we have really a vision for how this is going to come to market. Because I think we make a commitment to our customers when we say that "here's a game," or "here's a platform feature that you're going to see."

I had a sit-down with Don Mattrick, and John, and Mark Whitten, and we said okay Kudo (Tsunoda, General Manager at Microsot Game Studios and former overseer of Fight Night and Def Jam at EA), how do we feel about Natal? And what time do we think we can really start talking about it in a meaningful way. We looked at the games we were working on and had started playing, and we said well you know, the magic is here and we have pretty good visibility on how this is going to land, and we feel pretty good about it.

So it's definitely a real product, it's going to ship, it's not going be like Live Anywhere?
We are full speed ahead. I am treating Natal the same way we treated Xenon when we worked on 360. I have a portfolio map, I have hundreds of developers working on games, third-party publishers are getting dev kits right now - in fact some third parties have dev kits already, I have external developers that are working on games. For us, this is a platform launch and we are more than at the beginning. We are at the point where this is a real project.

Do you plan to have exceptional first party-titles for the launch? Just to show people how it's done?
Well, that's kind of our job, right? When I think about our first-party lineup I look at each game, and I understand why that game exists in our portfolio. What is it pushing creatively or technically for our platform?

And Natal is a perfect place for us as a first party to go and invest our best creative minds - we've got Kudo and Peter (Molyneux, boss of Fable creator Lionhead) and others that we just haven't talked about yet, building what we think will be the showcase games. We kind of put that on ourselves. On Live, early on, we did Halo 2, Project Gotham, we did a bunch of games where we said "we'll push Live, as a platform" and show this is a broad platform for many different kinds of games. Natal will be the same way, when we try and go out and built those kind of great hero experiences.


Will you also be encouraging people to build it into existing games?

The scenarios where it works for existing franchises, at least for us internally, running the studios - I haven't dictated any way that it has to find its way into Gears of War 7, or Halo 15 or something like that. It's been more about, let's get our creative minds thinking about what's possible.

In some cases I think there will be instances where it will fit in franchises in great ways. I mean, Milo is something that we started years ago, started something called Dmitri, and parts of it came out of that work at Lionhead, and the mix of NAtal and that effort created something really special. It wasn't that we shoehorned it in - like, "hey Peter, you need to deal with Natal" - it was more sitting down with Peter and challenging him creatively, let's think about something to do, and it matched very well with the vision he had. There might be some places where that works with existing franchises.

You've made some recent changes to the studio structure recently, you have a recent addition in the form of BigPark...
Yeah, I'm really happy about that.

And this comes after you divested yourselves of Ensemble and spun off Bungie. Is it the case you're only interested in owning studios that are better at casual games and going outside the traditional strengths of the console?
So when I became head of worldwide studios in the fall, one of the things I really wanted to instil in the organisation is focus. And focus was important - let's make sure that everythign we're doing aligns behind a strategy that makes sense from an overall platform perspective. Live is really important to us, Natal is really important to us, we have key franchises that are important and we want to continue to build big franchises, and I looked across the portfolio and I said if there are things that are maybe not aligned or slight distractions for us, then let's not work on those things. Even if they're profitable, even if they're franchises that I love, let's think about how we can invest our best and creative minds in areas that have complete synergy with the work we're doing on the platform.

And so things like Bigpark - Bigpark was working on Joyride, we'd been working on that game for about a year. And what I found in that studio was a studio that's - it's not neccessarily about the casual nature of the game, although that's great, it's that this is a team that thinks hard about what people are doing online and how we can build great community experiences. It's a free-to-play game where anybody can play and it fills a bunch of dynamics that we'll talke about that encourage people to play together, share together, and I just thought their minds and creative vision were a good match for what we were trying to do.

So you're not ruling out further additions? The studio portfolio could expand further if the opportunity came along?

Yeah, to be honest with you my focus is on working with the best talent in the industry. And that's remained my focus. Take Epic, we've worked with Epic now for what, seven years? Their next exclusive franchise, Shadow Complex, is coming exclusively to Xbox 360, these are - we don't own Epic.

It's not about the business relationship, although we have a healthy business relationship with Epic, it's about finding creative teams that we work well with, that share the same creative sensibilities and the same platform-driving DNA that we have, and let's go build great things together. In certain cases, an acquisition will make sense in others we'll just have a long-term business relationship - and either one's fine.

Shadow Complex is a very, very high-end Xbox Live Arcade game. Does that represent a new direction you want to go down or encourage, pushing Xbox Live as a channel for bespoke high-end games rather than ports?

I love your question because I mentioned earlier that every one of the games in the portfolio exists for a reaosn. They all make sense. And that is exactly Shadow Complex. We did a couple games last year that I was really proud of. Braid was one, that was an exceptional game, Castle Crashers, another exceptional first-party XBLA game, and people started to expect that oh, XBLA games are about [gestures] this size. Or kind of this art style, or something.

Shadow Complex we saw the opportunity to say you know, it's really about price points, it's really about digital distribution, it's having content for any kind of customer, from free-to-play games like 1 vs 100 and Joyride, and we did a Doritos free-to-play game [Dash of Destruction], up to sixty-dollar retail games. And it's making sure we have the full breadth of content. In today's economic climate, we have the cheapest next-gen console on the market, we've got content that people can play from free all the way up, and I think that just helps us serve our customers.

Are you keen to build in new methods for community engagement to the portfolio, both in products and later support?
Absolutely. We have the largest network in the living room today, on a global basis. Connections to things like Facebook and Twitter, just expand the number of people and the kind of ways you can communicate with people, I constantly challenge our creative leaders in the studios to come up with new ways of leveraging that community, and letting that community participate. So you saw in Forza and Forza 2, they went off and did the whole auction house, and the whole livery editor and that just blew up. Halo 3 we did Forge, we did saved films, and that just blew up and awya. We've got things like 1 vs 100 and Joyride, that are creating community - Joyride is thousands of people playing together, 1 vs 100 is thousands of people playing together, and it's not about falling into the trap of doing what others have done. It's about constantly challenging ourselves.

Even if you look at Gears of War 2, which could have easily ignored online and still sold incredibly well, they did Horde. And Horde - I don't know if you've played - is really fun. You get a bunch of buddies and you sit down and it's more arcade-like. And you see some other games, starting to take off on variants of that.

Our games - and I'll pick one of my favourites, Crackdown 2 - it's a challenge for that team. Crackdown 1, I thought was a hallmark in open world co-op gaming. I am not just gonna turn the crank. That team is gonna push and we're going to do something that's remarkable with that game as well. It's a challenge that I lay out to the teams, let's think about our platform and why we exist, let's get better with every release.

What has been your favourite moment in the 360's life so far?

This one's more personal, but for me the shipping of Fable 2, and seeing how that played out in the market because it did really well. Lionhead was the first acquisition I was deeply involved with, and working with somebody like Peter [Molyneux] and having people like that at Microsoft and then watching them build a big game, a really big game, that had high expectations but also every chance to do the sophomore slump. And I think they really hit it out of the park.

It helped for me because I was actually in the UK at the time, and I was down at the studio quite a bit, it's been a while since I had that amount of touch time with the team when they're in crunch, standing up in meetings - like I said, that's more about me, but that for me was something that was really special to see how that game came out in a crowded market and really did well.

It did really well, yeah.
Yeah. We were really worried about Fallout 3, a great game shipping right around it, LittleBigPlanet was right there, Gears of War and all that stuff, and I'm really proud of that team. And then you see things like Milo and other things and Lionhead just continues to go big.

Closing part - what's the future for Xbox?
We talked a lot about community, and what I think five years out I think we're going to be talking about Live as our platform. And not about any individual on-ramp on to Live, as the reason we're sitting here.

You talked about Live Anywhere, and you said it was here and now it's gone. I will tell you that vision is still alive and strong inside our organisation, and while I love the 360, I think Windows 7 is going to be a nice release. I can see mobile devices around that can connect seamlessly now, I look forward and I think what we're going to see is a connected space where we play and we will play in our living room, play in our den, play on the train, and Live will become the glue, and the friends and the entertainment you consume through that network will be the things that we're focused on as the platform. I truly believe that.

So the platform becomes the cloud, rather than the devices that connect to it?
That's right. And I try not to use "cloud" because that's become a little cliched for people. Not just talking about you - we use it as a company, we talk about cloud computing, Ray Ozzie (Microsoft's Chief Software Architect) loves to talk about cloud computing, I don't think he's wrong.

But we kind of backed into it a little bit - consciously, but you add things like Netflix to the environment, you add things like FAcebook, Twitter, Sky, and we just keep expanding the world of people that want to play, and that kinds of people that want to come and connect.

And there's a reason for more people to play. The number of people that we see that 1 vs 100 is their first online experience is incredibly high and for me, that's great. It's that phenomenon we'll continue to push, new content bringing new people online.

Do you you think that 1 vs 100 will drive people to try other games online?
I think so. What we've found is that when people make their first online - if we want to focus on transactions, once they get over the hurdle of the first one, they become constant buyers of stuff. They consume, it's safe for them, they get it. Getting online, there's that same kind of phobia for some people. And we've created an experience that's very natural, it's your Avatar, on-screen playing a game show type game, you can win prizes, you can win points, so you feel like you actually get something from it.

The three of us could be playing it on screen here and you might know the answer to this question so you yell it out, or you hit the button, you're in, you're winning, and we're just hanging out. Playing a game with thousands of other people simultaneously.

I guess that's another thing I tend to forget, as a Live gamer - it's not just the community through Live, it's the community on the sofa.
Yeah. We call it Couch Social.

Microsoft PR: You forgot to ask him what his favourite game is!

Oh yes. What's your favourite game?
Ever? Civilisation. Sid Meier's Civilisation. Favourite console game, Crackdown 1.

Did that affect the commissioning of Crackdown 2?
We can all have our personal favourites, can't we? [laughs]

Jon Hicks