Mibu no ookami
Demoted Member® Pro™
The gaffes of the One might not have been recoverable but Phil has done very little to pull back from the nosedive with the significance of the little determined by how one weighs the impact of the One X or the their Backwards Compatibility program. Everything else feels like a billion dollar throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks with little thought of the long term nor the effects that one clump of shit would have on another. I'm not sure the bolded miracle is a win either. At least if he had made the decision to exit the market and shift focus that would have shown some forethought instead of that decision being forced upon him. We still have "insiders" here thinking there will be more Xbox hardware, be it traditional, a handheld, or a spec for 3rd parties to follow, it all seems destined for a similar fate. Given the war chest that has been spent under his reign and the lack of results, I'm not so sure there isn't an argument to be made.
I think you have to forgive Phil the position he inherited.
He didn't inherit quality development studios. Bungie had already left and Epic had already relinquished Gears. They just didn't have the studios to compete with Sony in a post TLOU world. That was a seismic shift in gaming and in the dynamic between Microsoft and Sony. Honestly, the shift really started with Uncharted 2, but TLOU was a step beyond that.
I think it feels like he has been throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks because so many efforts have been unsuccessful, but they've largely been unsuccessful because the foundation was never there.
Not to get political, but to offer an analogy he is like Putin trying to reconstitute the USSR. What companies did he buy? Zenimax and Activision. The two companies that were extremely key to the success of the Xbox 360.
He is being forced out of the console market as Nadella has clearly had enough. All Phil Spencer did was buy the xbox community some time.
And the die hards will stick with them even if their next hardware is actually a PC as long as it retains Xbox Live and if they release a handheld partnered with ROG that similarly retains Xbox Live, they'll buy that too, but no, I don't think they'll put out another traditional console.
Everything from here on out comes down to timing. When do they announce key games to release on PS5? How do they minimize alienating key consumers who they want to follow them to PC-Land? How do they try and maintain the GamePass numbers that they have with fewer titles coming to the program? The only reason Phil Spencer is still at Microsoft is to navigate that. We'll see how long he lasts.