Games in this podcast range from E to M. Hello everybody, welcome to the official Xbox podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside Xbox, or outside of Summer Game Fest Play Days, where we are at the Fallout 76 Fishing Hole, or Fission Hole. Okay, we'll keep it. I'm Jeff Rubenstein, and along with someone who needs no introduction, Phil Spencer.
Yes, I work at Xbox. First podcast you've ever done in a lawn chair, I believe, in a lawn chair and in front of a kiddie pool. I think both of those are true. Well, always trying to unlock achievements even when we're away from our console. So we're here, like I said, at Summer Game Fest Play Days, and just this past Sunday we brought to players two hours of games and hardware that they're going to be experiencing really already now. Yes, we'll be getting to that. Before we get into everything that we talked about on Sunday, I'd like to just talk more about Xbox in 2025, where things are as we got on a plane and flew down to LA. How are you feeling about the year?
I feel really good. I think 2025 is an exciting year for us. Maybe I'll start for us as a team. I think our first-party teams have done amazing work so far this year. When you think about the launches that we've had, we're investing in a new form factor piece of hardware for us with our partners at ASUS, which means on our side we have a lot of design work that we did with them. We did a lot of operating system work that continues the Xbox experience on that. These are areas we're investing. I think Game Pass is having an amazing year. When I look at Xbox Play Anywhere and how much that's showing up in the show, there's so many things that are working for us right now. Our jobs inside the company is to run a good business. We're accountable to Microsoft for running a good business, a healthy business that continues to grow at both top line and bottom line. That's kind of a foundation for us, and what that does is it allows us to continue to invest in Xbox for our community of players and creators. That we're doing it does mean we have to make trade-offs through the year on things that we're going to invest more in, things that we're not going to invest as much in, because it is kind of the business that we are. But the business is having really good success. I even think to the last quarter and some of the stats that Satya Nadella, my boss, the CEO of Microsoft, and Amy Hood, the CFO, went through talking about how the business is growing. I'm just really proud of the scale of the Xbox business right now. It's obviously never been as big as it is now, and how it's really delivering for our players, our creators, and the company. That's a strong position, and I don't think our players have ever had so much to play in a given year. Just so far this year we've experienced Avowed, South of Midnight, Oblivion Remastered. We got to surprise everyone and just have an amazing time reliving that world. Doom: The Dark Ages, and then next month we're going to have Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4, followed by Grounded 2, Gears of War Reloaded, Ninja Gaiden 4, Keeper, and it goes on and on. It's an incredible year. It's something we're as a player I'm certainly enjoying. But is this the plan playing out before our eyes?
Yeah, definitely. Getting the first-party teams supported so they can go build the games that they envision, that they want to build at the level of quality. It's not just about quantity of games. I also love the diversity when I look at the portfolio that we have. For us in looking at the months and the year and making sure that we've got the right games at the right time, pacing the portfolio is always good learning and growth for us. But when I look at what the teams are able to deliver now, I'm just so proud. I think they're sharing ideas among themselves. They're learning and building on technology that each other's sharing, whether it's The Coalition doing Unreal work for so many teams or the id Tech work that gets shared between the teams, really allowing our first-party teams to deliver what I would say is some of the best games they've ever delivered. That is definitely the goal when you think about the pace and the quality that we want to be at. This is a great 2025, and I'm really excited about 2026 as well.
Do we see that? Do you see the studios talking to each other and sharing expertise and things like that?
Yeah, I want to give kudos to Matt Booty and the leadership team of studios. One of the things, and I grew up here building games in first party, it's not always easy as a team to find the right forum to share your ideas in a safe way, because we know if we put it out there publicly then it's on display and it's going to get judged. It's been awesome to see the community of our first party come together on tech forums, on dev days, sharing their ideas with each other and getting feedback. When you look across the creative teams that we have, it's just an amazing group that in a safe way you can say, 'Here's something I'm looking at, here's what I'd want to do,' and get feedback from our other teams before you go public with something, and maybe you never go public with it. You try something, get feedback. I see that from a technology standpoint, the shared tech that our teams share across the different teams, whether it's Unreal Engine work or the id Tech work that you see moving around between the studios, the creative discussions that happen in the studios. I think it's leading to these teams—you think of something like South of Midnight, we think like Doom: The Dark Ages—these are amazing accomplishments that our teams are coming out with. I'm playing through Avowed right now. Fantastic game. I just love that these teams are realizing their full potential. I put about 65 hours into Avowed. I loved it. Coming into this weekend we knew we had The Outer Worlds 2 Direct, we were going to be seeing that. Got to have an amazing surprise. I was just watching the chat as Grounded 2 got announced and they're like, 'A third game, a third game.' Obsidian just having an incredible year.
They are, they are. And you saw when they were talking about also in the Directs how they've leveraged other teams, they partnered with external teams. Capability that we've had as Xbox for a long time to allow them to increase their creative capability. So having Idos Montreal partner with us in building games allows them to up the output. Grounded 1 was one of those where the first one was like 12 people that built that game, and we knew we wanted to go bigger with Grounded 2. The mounts, the things that they've—I played a ton of Grounded 1. But Obsidian internally really has a culture of learning through shipping and growing and building on the successes that they have. I think Avowed was fantastic, and I thought The Outer Worlds 2 showed incredibly well in the show. Very cool that we get to play two games from them in like the next four months. It's great, really great. Looking forward to that. So I want to talk about inXile next. I was a big fan of Wasteland 3, put dozens of hours into it. There was so much flexibility and different ways you could change the outcome of the game with their decision-making. We knew that they're a strong team when it comes to writing. Then you see Clockwork Revolution, and I was reminded of the meme, 'I owe you an apology, I was not familiar with your game.' Did you know inXile could do this?
Yeah, it's one of those things. When you talk to Brian Fargo and the team, you knew that they were the ones that were going to set the bar very high for themselves. They had an aspiration that they wanted to hit creatively as a studio from our earliest discussions about them becoming part of Xbox. But it's hard being a small independent studio out there, looking for your next game while you're finishing your previous game, trying to make sure you've got the wherewithal to continue going. I just see them now with Clockwork Revolution, which I thought was just an amazing game in our show. The first time we started looking at that asset and just watching the video come together, the gameplay, the team—that is a team that sets an incredibly high bar for themselves. It's kind of a privilege to get to work with them at the level of expertise they have. We were able to partner with them to give them some tech support, time, resources, and I think what you see now is just the ultimate manifestation of an inXile game: a hard, gritty world, RPG mechanics, storytelling. I think the thing we all probably get a little blown away by is just the level of graphic fidelity that they're showing right now. The game looks amazing, and also a very memorable trailer. The meta game for us was scrolling the social feeds and watching people go, 'Okay, this is now moved to the top of my radar.' We knew that when we were looking at this, because we start crafting the show back in December, January, start looking at what might be in the show. When we first started to get some sight into what inXile was building, I knew it would be one of the real standouts in the show. It was a privilege, and we gave it a lot of time in the show. We wanted to make sure people saw gameplay, they saw dialogue, they saw the ability to build and craft weapons and the different choices and skins that people had there, and then you wanted the story to pop through and the writing. I'm glad that we gave it the time it had, and the response from the community has been fantastic.
Awesome. Another team that kind of keeps us guessing all the time: Double Fine. From one game to the next, we were talking earlier like the team that made Stacking also made Massive Chalice. These are games that everything is completely original and feels like Keeper is going to be another one of those in the pantheon from Double Fine.
Yeah, I'm a huge fan. It was one of those when we were putting the flow, I wanted to make sure I got to talk about the game as we came out of the reveal for Keeper. I've known Tim since original Xbox, and a big fan of Psychonauts. In fact, when I was watching that game kind of come into focus for the show, I went back and reignited my Double Fine love. I went back and played The Cave, I went back and played Iron Brigade. It was just reminding me of some of the great things that that team—very diverse team when you think about the different mechanics and stories that they've told. That one just had such a soulful play to it as you watched, and I can't wait for people to get to play it. It's really great that we get to do new IP, which also showed up very well in the show when you think about Clockwork Revolution and Keeper, and enable teams to go and create new games. Another game we don't have to wait too long before we all get to enjoy. Something I love about these shows, and obviously there's a lot of focus on the big reveals, the debuts, the world premieres, is that we're able to make space for these games that have been building communities for years and have been adding new content and have now tens of millions of players. So we saw Season 17 of Sea of Thieves, ESO showed off new content for their 26 million players, new content for Age of Mythology which has been awesome to keep seeing that playing and including mythologies from all over the world, and Fallout 76. Are you going to be out taking up fishing?
I love playing Fallout 76. I do have this issue that it's one of the games where I run around with my gamer tag in my head when I play the game, and the community is so inviting but I always end up with a big group of people around playing. But it's a really interesting point on how you balance the mix of new things in our show. These communities have millions and millions of players, and you want to be respectful of them and show the new content that's coming. The teams that do all the work on those franchises, I'm very proud of the success those teams have had in fostering and growing gaming communities around living games. It's not easy. You've had teams like Rare that this wasn't really in their background, and even when you watched at the launch of Sea of Thieves and now we're sitting here at Season 17, just an amazing accomplishment by that team and all they've learned and evolved and grew. It's another area where our teams share a lot of ideas and learning, because these are games that have a lot of players, the community is really strong, and we want to make sure we continue to support them. Something that you've been very vocal about over, I mean for many years, is just how important it is for you to ensure that Xbox players are enjoying the amazing games that come out of game creators in Japan. We saw a lot of that here in the Xbox Game Showcase. We want to run down through some of the games here. Ninja Gaiden 4, of course we got to see a pretty in-your-face list of 2025. We started the year obviously with Ninja Gaiden 2 the remaster. You just think about how Ninja Gaiden means so much to us on Xbox, and it was awesome seeing 4 in the show.
