In a recent segment that aired at PAX West, Phil Spencer spoke at length about his time in the gaming industry, leaning on some of the choices he regrets making many years ago. In the ‘Story Time with Phil Spencer’ presentation, the Xbox leader revealed that he mourns ‘passing on’ games like Destiny and Guitar Hero.
‘The Worst Game-Choice Decisions’
Over an hour at PAX West, Phil Spencer divulged his intimate experiences with the games industry, touching on anecdotes dating back more than twenty years. During his segment, he revealed:
I’ve passed on some of the worst… Like, made some of the worst game-choice decisions.
Expanding on that, Spencer revealed that he never secured Destiny effectively at Xbox, missing the opportunity to make it an Xbox exclusive. He admitted it ‘didn’t click’ with him when he played it. It took months for him to be swayed by Destiny, which at the time was naturally close to Microsoft thanks to Bungie being under the firm’s umbrella.
He then spoke about dropping the ball with Guitar Hero because he didn’t think the concept would work:
An interesting one is when this team came down to Redmond and Alex Rigopulos, he pitches a game where they’re actually going to make plastic guitars, and they’re going to plug into consoles, and then they’re going to sell tracks where you’re going to play Simon on this guitar and I’m like, really? Do we really think that’s going to work?
Thanks to Eurogamer for the quotes
Activision ultimately picked up both Destiny and Guitar Hero from a publishing perspective, and both became remarkably successful titles. In 2009, Activision claimed that Guitar Hero 3 was the highest-grossing game of all time, and when it was released, it beat the likes of Wii Fit and Black Ops in gross sales.
In dollars and cents figures, it was claimed that Guitar Hero 3 grossed almost $1 billion.
In Phil Spencer’s words, ‘I heard that turned into a pretty good game…’
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He also greenlit a ton of the worst games ever why is he in charge? Fire him and his horrible staff especially Aaron Greenberg now!
Fire Phil now and bring back Sheamus and Ed they should have been given this budget they would have made Xbox the gaming platform.