You know what they say: Hindsight is Xbox 360.
CEOs have to make some tough decisions. Sure, mostly it’s a matter of ‘What shall I spend my seven-figure salary on this month?’ and ‘How many employees should we lay off for choices that had nothing to do with them?’ But sometimes you have to make some executive calls that can massively impact the fortunes of the company you command.
Take, for instance, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, who revealed at a recent PAX Panel (via GamesRadar) that he’s made more than a couple of bad calls when it comes to signing games for Xbox. Spencer says he’s made some of the “worst game choice decisions” during his tenure at the company. For instance, he passed on picking up both Guitar Hero and Destiny as Xbox exclusives.
“This team came down to Redmond… and [Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopoulos] pitches a game where they’re actually going to make plastic guitars and they’re going to plug into consoles and then they’re gonna sell tracks where you’re gonna play Simon on this guitar,” Spencer reminisced.
Clearly, a doomed venture. “I’m like ‘Really? Do we really think that’s going to work?'” Spencer remembers thinking before he passed on signing the game to Xbox. Of course, it went on to spawn the mega-successful Guitar Hero series with its first entry on the, ah, PS2. Whoops.
Destiny was a similar story. The game’s Xbox preview builds “didn’t really click with me,” said Spencer, “I’m not a big PvP player… and I was a little worried that I was gonna get thrown into a PvP world, and it turns out that’s not what it was at all.”
Which really makes you realise how strange and arbitrary these seemingly momentous business decisions can be, doesn’t it? Destiny 1 came out in 2014 as a multiplatform release, free from a contract that would have restricted it to Microsoft’s platform, and it’s apparently down to the fact that Spencer just isn’t much of a PvP guy and figured that’s what the game was gonna be. It was only the release of the House of Wolves expansion that won Spencer over to the game.
You kind of expect these choices to be a bit more scientific, don’t you? But it turns out that if—by some bizarre miracle—I ended up CEO of a major console publisher every dev would be out of luck when it came to nabbing exclusivity deals for anything that isn’t a weird CRPG or immersive sim. Would that be a better world? Yes. But it wouldn’t be enormously fair.
Anyway, Spencer clearly regards those decisions as mistakes, but he doesn’t beat himself up over them. “I’m not a regrets-type person,” said Spencer, “I passed on so many games that I could look back and say ‘Argh!’ but, no, I try to look forward and be positive.”
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