Xbox boss Phil Spencer has admitted he may not be the best judge of which games will be successful, saying he missed the chance to release both Destiny and Guitar Hero in the past.
Eurogamer discovered an interview with Spencer at the PAX West video game convention in which he said he initially got the wrong impression about Destiny, despite Microsoft having such close ties to its developer Bungle, the creator of the Xbox flagship Halo series.
“I have to be honest, when Destiny 1 came out and I played maybe some of the preview builds we did on Xbox, it didn’t really click for me,” Spencer said. “I’m not a big PvP player. You can see my player history; that’s not a lot of what I do. And I was a little scared that I was going to be thrown into a PvP world, and it turned out to be not that at all.”
Destiny was released in 2014 by publisher Activision (which, ironically, is now owned by Microsoft but is no longer the publisher of Destiny) and was a huge hit, selling over six million copies within a month and spawning several expansions.
Destiny 2 launched in 2017 and is still supported today (albeit not without complications), now under the PlayStation umbrella after Sony bought Bungie in 2022.
“What interests me about Destiny is my history with Bungie and their evolution in working on games,” Spencer continued. “I love that it’s a local team. I still have a lot of friends there and yes, they belong to each other now, but it’s a game I’ll always love and a team I’ll always have a great affinity for.”
When asked if it wasn’t frustrating that he turned down Bungie, Spencer said that this wasn’t even the only time something of this magnitude had happened.
“I have so many of those,” he said. “I’ve passed on some of the… I’ve made some of the worst game decisions.”
“An interesting thing: When this team came to Redmond, Alex Rigopulos (the former CEO of Harmonix), who is great, I love Alex, proposed a game where they actually make plastic guitars, plug them into consoles, and then sell songs,” Spencer continued, explaining why he passed on Guitar Hero.
“I thought, ‘Seriously? Do we really think this is going to work?’ A few people were playing Guitar Hero. I heard it turned out to be a pretty good game.
“I’m not a person who regrets things, maybe that’s a mistake on my part, but I’ve missed so many games that I can look back and…” He shook his fist. “But no, I try to look forward and be positive about the things we’re doing. And with Destiny, I just like to celebrate what the team has done.”
Both the Destiny games and the Guitar Hero collection of titles were released on multiple platforms, so Xbox was able to share in at least some of their success. But in a complete reversal, Spencer is now allowing potential Xbox exclusives to appear on competing platforms.
This began in early 2024, when Xbox announced that Pentiment and Grounded would be coming to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5, and the latter later received former exclusives Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves. Xbox made it clear that this practice could apply to major new releases as well, recently announcing that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would also be coming to PS5 after launching on Xbox.
Image source: Franziska Krug/Getty Images for Game Association of the German Games Industry
Ryan Dinsdale is a freelance reporter at IGN. He talks about The Witcher all day long.
