The Xbox brand has done wonderful things since Phil Spencer took over. For a few years, Microsoft led the Xbox name into a direction that wasn’t as focused on gamers as it should be. In the years since Spencer took over, he vowed to change that and his work speaks volumes. Given how many studios Microsoft has acquired in the last year, many may be wondering what’s next. A few pesky rumors have also popped up, all of which the Xboss himself addressed.
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There have been rumors that Microsoft was looking to acquire EA. Since EA is a mega-Publisher with its own impressive list of acquired studios, this rumor was hard to believe but easy to understand. Spencer himself quelled these rumors and explained why they have no interested in EA during the Barclays 2018 Global Technology conference.
“If you watch the studio acquisitions we’ve done, we’re focused on creative teams that we think can build very interesting content to help the flywheel Game Pass grow and our platforms grow,” the Xbox boss mentioned. “We’re probably less interested in management teams and infrastructure and things that we already have inside of our organization. And you can just look at the track record. We’ve added seven studios in six months, and if you look at them, I think you’ll see certain evaluations.
“But more importantly, the creative teams that we’re picking up, [we’re doing it] knowing that we can then plug them into a Microsoft infrastructure, an Xbox infrastructure to help those teams succeed, with more solid funding, alignment towards goals around Game Pass, reaching gamers everywhere,” he continued. “And we don’t have to pay for some of the things that some of the bigger publishers have, that we probably already have under our roof.”
It’s not about just collecting pieces to a bigger puzzle, it’s about making sure they are growing the brand in a more creative direction that benefits gamers and their thirst for new adventures, “Our focus hasn’t been on going out and adding duplicative functions that we’d be paying for that I don’t think we need, but more on how we can find the creative independent teams out there. And I feel really good about the path that we’re on right now.”
With a host of new studios under their belt, including the famed Obsidian Entertainment, it will be interesting to see what else the Xbox team has in store in the coming years.
