Despite many of his own staff having little faith in Xbox Game Pass, it’s been revealed that Phil Spencer pushed to make it a reality.
As much as Game Pass has now become the Xbox’s killer app that was never guaranteed and new information reveals just how much Xbox boss Phil Spencer had to fight for it.
In a profile on Spencer by the Wall Street Journal, Richard Irving, who once served as product leader for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, until he left Microsoft in 2016, recounts how Spencer pushed back against the criticisms Game Pass faced.
Apparently, Spencer’s own staff argued that the service would never take off, believing that other publishers wouldn’t participate and that it would eat into profits. Regardless, Spencer refused to backed down.
‘He wouldn’t take no for an answer,’ said Irving. ‘He was always trying to find a way to make it work.’
Still, Game Pass has proven popular enough to warrant demands for Sony to do the exact same thing. A PlayStation Game Pass has been heavily rumoured recently, following a December report of a service codenamed Spartacus that combines PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now.
Bolstering Game Pass with new games is part of the reason behind Microsoft’s acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, since it can add those studios’ game libraries to the service.
Although the Activision Blizzard acquisition must first be approved by regulators, with the US Federal Trade Commission set to scrutinise the deal and ensure it doesn’t violate anti-monopoly rules.
The deal being blocked would be a substantial blow to Microsoft’s plans, although CEO Satya Nadella doesn’t seem that concerned by the possibility.
While Microsoft is already a massive company, much larger than Sony, Nadella argues that the deal should be viewed in the context of the video games market, saying that Microsoft will still only be third to Sony and Tencent in terms of the games industry.
‘At the end of the day, all the analysis here has to be done through a lens of what’s the category we’re talking about,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘And what about the market structure? Even post-this acquisition, we will be number three with sort of low teens [market] share, where even the highest player is also [in the] teens [for market] share.
‘It shows how fragmented content creation platforms are. And so, that’s the fundamental category. Yes, we will be a big player in what is a highly fragmented place.’
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