Phil Spencer Says Xbox Is in It for the Long Haul
According to executive vice-president of Gaming at Microsoft Phil Spencer, Xbox is playing a long-term game rather than looking at the small picture. Xbox isn’t really planning a one-year strategy, rather it’s thinking about the next two to three years. Spencer recently joined Major Nelson’s (Larry Hryb’s) podcast to tease Xbox’s near-future plans. One of the big plans continues to be growing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate which brings the Game Pass lineup to Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and mobile devices through Project xCloud.
“It’s easy to be impatient, that’s one of the things I think a lot about when I’m talking to the teams. I went back and I was looking at the Netflix numbers when Netflix launched and how long it took them to get to one million subscribers. Now they were kind of the first to really do an online streaming subscription at scale,” said Phil Spencer. Major Nelson quickly commented to discuss the transition from disc to digital which has been a key focus of Xbox lately as well.
“It was years before they (Netflix) got to one million subscribers and I think we look at Game Pass today and it’s three years old,” continued Phil Spencer. “The numbers that we’re hitting, the engagement, and the way that creators are now targeting Game Pass. We get people from the original idea of a game, they haven’t even started building the game coming to us and saying ‘hey we’d like this to be a Game Pass game.'”
“2021 is just going to be an incredible year when I look at the lineup of games coming (to Game Pass) and we continue to work to bring it to more people… I think we accelerated the trajectory that gaming was on when you just look at the growth that gaming had from a user and a business standpoint and you look at this really concentrated nine months of so many people isolated, I think we accelerated probably two years the adoption that was happening in gaming.”
Do you see Xbox becoming a bigger deal over the next two or three years? Let us know in the comments below!