Phil Spencer

After passing on Xbox 360 backwards compatibility when initially unveiling the Xbox One, Microsoft has had a real change of heart about the feature. Phil Spencer announced this past E3 …
Read More

Gamers with an eye on E3, which seems to have started earlier than ever this year, knew Oculus Rift was set to hold a media briefing full of announcements …
Read More

Phil Spencer tweeted the above image, saying, “Nice to finally be doing this on my Xbox One dev kit.” You see that itty bitty text in the center that says “Press Y to save the screenshot?” That’s probably what he’s talking about.

Last October, Phil Spencer promised to let you save screenshots on your Xbox One in a future update, and it looks like it’s coming soon. We only just got the February update that brought Game Hubs, custom backgrounds, faster controller connectivity, and other things, so he’s keeping his team busy.

Read More

Playing games from the comfort of other devices in one’s own home holds promise in itself if implemented properly, and with the Xbox One aiming to be the all-in-one …
Read More

When Microsoft announced in September that it would acquire Minecraft developer Mojang for the price of $2.5 billion, no one outside the company seemed to be able to agree on what it should do with its new asset. Many gamers, journalists and analysts did agree on one thing, however: a sequel probably isn’t a good idea. Microsoft apparently isn’t ready to prove them wrong.

Speaking in an IGN podcast, Xbox head Phil Spencer insisted that his company knows it must first satisfy the needs of the current Minecraft community before expanding the franchise. That means that a sequel to the almost inconceivably popular world-building game may not be in the plans.

“I don’t know if Minecraft 2, if that’s the thing that makes the most sense,” said Spencer. “The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there. We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else. It doesn’t mean that everything we’re going to do is going to map to 100 percent of their acceptance, because I don’t know if there is any topic where 100 percent of people agree. But we look at Job 1 is to go out and meet the needs of the Minecraft community first, and then we can think about ways that we can actually help grow it. That’s our sole focus.”

Read More

The December update for the Xbox One will not contain the highly anticipated screenshot feature. Xbox head Phil Spencer has told IGN that gamers should set their expectations appropriately for …
Read More

There isn’t much love in the developer world for the ID@Xbox parity clause, which requires independent game developers to release their games on Xbox One at the same time as on other platforms. Some developers have lodged public complaints about it, and rival Sony has lambasted it.

It’s not that Xbox head Phil Spencer hasn’t heard these complaints, it’s that he believes that despite these objections and ridicule, the parity clause takes care of his most important audience: Xbox One owners.

“The thing I worry about is — because I look at all the people who buy an Xbox, and they invest their time and their money in Xbox One, and, as millions of people obviously own Xbox Ones, I want them to feel like they’re first-class, because they are,” Spencer said on The Inner Circle podcast. “When a third-party game comes out, it comes out on all platforms at the same time, and when indie games come out, I want them to come out and I want Xbox to feel like it’s a first-class citizen when an indie game launches.

“So, for me, the parity thing is, if you own an Xbox One, I want to work for you to make sure that when great content launches, if it’s coming to Xbox and another platform, that you kind of get it at the same time everybody else does.”

Read More

On a recent edition of The Inner Circle podcast, Xbox boss Phil Spencer dished on some of the features he’s seen floating around the office. As Phil says, “I …
Read More

Phil Spencer revealed while talking to CVG that Rare was in fact working on a new title. In recent years Rare had been seen as the “Kinect team” …
Read More

Long a staple on Steam and more recently appearing on the PlayStation 4, pre-ordering digital games has given gamers on these platforms the ability to …
Read More