It's like the most corporate sounding thing in the world, but somebody say it.
Great to be on. It's great. What, 250 episodes? Congrats. It's like what an accomplishment. I love your voice in the community. It's just such an important part of what you've meant for Xbox obviously over the years, and your consistency and what you do, the way you kind of tune your voice on things. I love it. So congrats on the milestone. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks, appreciate it. Thank you. It's lovely to have you, it really is. And we have to wish you a belated happy birthday. I think it was a couple of weeks ago, and you popped by into the...
Crazy to think about. But no, all the wishes are so nice. And I always say having a birthday in early January is like the worst because everybody's kind of all presents and everything out. But it's always nice to hear from everybody.
I've got a nephew whose birthday is the 31st. It's literally New Year's Eve, and it's like, oh, it's so rough. It's right on Christmas.
That's right. We should band together, us post-Christmas birthdays, and do something big.
It's the people that give you a present that's this for Christmas and birthday. There's a special circle of hell for that. You get ripped off, I'm telling you. You get ripped off. I have to wonder though, Phil Spencer, a CEO at Microsoft, what do you get Phil Spencer for his birthday? Is it like, as a graybeard like us, is it...
So I got a rescue dog. He was a fantastic... don't get me going on Oogie because that'll be the show. But now my family, my daughters, I have two daughters in their 20s, and they both get me like t-shirts with Oogie's face on it, towels and other things. So Oogie has become the center of the gift-giving. Every time I come home, no matter how bad or good the day has been, he runs to the door. Everybody should have a good dog and unconditional love. It's fantastic. Good times.
I'm gonna get you V-Bucks for your birthday. Not...
For us, the Developer Direct was yesterday. We're obviously not airing this for a few weeks for episode 250, but that's an impressive showing you guys just put on. I love that the Developer Direct is like January now. It's like, start of the year, bang, and we're off to the races. You managed to keep most of the surprises a surprise. I'm pleased that no one outright said... because it was known to a degree, but not everything was known. How pleased are you and the team that you managed to keep that secret?
Well, I think this was our third year that we've done Developer Direct. And it'll sound self-congratulatory, but the team here... storytelling in their studios is awesome. And yes, we're all on pins and needles like, can we keep it? And it's true, some members of the press might have had a glimpse on Ninja Gaiden and what was going to come, but I don't think they knew both and that there was a drop that day. I didn't see that. And then there were other guesses that were out there that kind of lived. But no, the show, I loved it. We all got together as a team and watched it even though we've seen it so many times. And it's just fun because certain people have seen parts of it but not the whole thing. So it's fun. We get into a bigger room here and watch it together. And it's a nice day for the community, a nice day for the teams. I saw a picture from the Platinum team...
Means I get to see what you're playing a lot of the time, and I noticed you playing Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, which we've all been playing now thanks to Game Pass. Do you like that plug? Now, I get the idea of not wanting to pick a favorite child, but from everything we saw at the Dev Direct, what are you looking forward to the most to playing from the Dev Direct?
Well, again, this will sound a little bit like an ad, but the nice thing is there's some pacing to it right, and when the games launch, so you can play them all. You actually don't need... and the first one, which even wasn't in the Direct, would be Age of Mythology. I'm really looking forward to that. On Ninja Gaiden, I wanted us to bring back and flew out a few times to Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja and even Platinum to try to bring that partnership together. It took years, and we've been working on it for a very long time. And consequently, it's shipping in 2025 on Ninja Gaiden 4, which is cool to see. But that was just the results of a lot of work. But I always like Doom. It has such a place for me in my gaming history. And then the moment where the whole id team is in their theater there and they announce their date together, that was just one of those moments as somebody who gets to work with all of our teams here, it just kind of lights you up inside. But world-building, and then Exhibition 33, what a fantastic looking game. So I see how I didn't actually highlight one, but they're all kind of special for me for their own reasons.
You didn't answer my question at all.
Phil training... yeah, it's interesting, right? And you talk about... I loved the bit with all the guys, it's releasing in May and they're all in the theater screaming. It was super cool. And the thing I love the most about the Dev Direct, aside from being fed awesome games, is that you actually see the developers behind it, but not in this kind of canned, cheesy way. You guys let the mistakes come in. And because no one... Hugo's line at them a lot of the time. So I think it's really nice to actually see the faces of those developers. Now, when it comes to the Dev Direct itself, fans have gotten used to over the last sort of 18 months of PlayStation announces for games. And you guys didn't shy away from it this time on your own show. Typically it's been like, we'll talk about that afterwards, we'll put a press release out or a blog post, but you're just showing the PlayStation logo now. I mean, we've embraced the future here at Xbox, we understand the bigger picture here. But is this just, hey, this is the band-aid off guys, this is we're still going to be different decisions, but this is the new era, get used to the way things are going to be? How would you frame that to the...
Couldn't get all of the assets done and it felt weird to have some of them in and some of them out. But I just want to be transparent with people. If we're shipping on Nintendo Switch, we're going to put that. If we're shipping on PlayStation, if we're on Steam, people should know the storefronts where they can get our games. But I want people to be able to experience our Xbox community and our games and everything we have to offer on every screen we can. And obviously not every screen is equal. There's certain things we can't do on the other closed platforms that we can do on open platforms. Cloud is different. But games should be the thing that we're focused on. And this strategy that we have allows us to do big games while also supporting our native platform, from hardware to the platform and services that we have. And that's going to be our approach. And I know it's not what everybody else is...
Yeah, and it's because more people can play. So yeah, just trying to be open and transparent with people. It's funny as well, there was a radio host in the UK called James O'Brien, and he was on his radio show today. I don't know if you saw the clip going around on Twitter, but he was talking about how he's a PS5 guy but he's also an old graybeard, and he was like, I want to play Indiana Jones, so he loaded it up on his Samsung TV and played the entire game through cloud. Now I think that's cool. Let's do more of that. As an old person now, I feel like if I was a kid, I'd be in hog heaven with Game Pass. You're not old, dude. Come on. I look older than Nick and he's 44.
Yeah, actually younger than all of us. But yeah, who does it benefit to keep games? It used to be the fact that the largest thing in our industry were the platforms. The largest thing now are the games. And I think that's good for the games industry. That's what the industry is about: storytellers of all sizes being able to tell their stories through the games that they create, and allowing more people to play. I want Xbox to be the platform that enables that. That's why I loved at the beginning of the showcase of the Dev Direct, we could put up all those games that say Xbox play anywhere. And it's like, they're on cloud. We've obviously done our work with not only is cloud part of the Game Pass portfolio, but you're seeing more games added to the buy your games and be able to stream your games. Those games can be played. Not helping the games themselves. And I think we should optimize for the best games that we can have in this industry.
It's a damned good answer. I think it's funny, I've seen a lot of people repeating something that you said back during the whole Activision Blizzard drama in the FTC about how Sony uses the 30% that they make on Xbox published games on their platform to kind of reduce your standing in the market. I saw a great point from Sam Tolan on Windows Central, he's like, well what about the 70% that they make? It's funding more games for all of us to play. Can't we focus on that? Console wars is a social construct after all, right?
PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it's they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there. And I don't want to then look at that and say, well there's no way that we should be able to build a business there, find fans of our franchises there. I'm not trying to move them all over to Xbox. We're all so invested in where our games are. Let's just allow more people to play. And yes, the 70% that we make on games on other platforms is helpful to us being able to build great portfolios like we showed at Dev Direct. And I hope it will continue to show through the rest of the year.
That has been one of the main things that we talk about with our community. Their worry is, oh, will they be the Sega that just becomes third party? It's like no, the feeling...
A thing for a while, and I want to show respect to the people who voice their concerns to me. I get it. And I would never disrespect anybody who comes with a concern. I've got a library of games on Xbox console. I want to make sure I'll continue to be able to play those games. Are we gonna still do hardware? Are we gonna still get to play the games the way we've always played? Am I gonna have to rent all my games? Can I still buy games? I get the questions. I think we've shown respect for people's libraries over the generations with back compat and Play Anywhere, and I want to continue to do that. You can buy every game that's in Game Pass. We're not trying to funnel everybody into one business model. Play the games the way you want. Embracing cloud has allowed us to grow. It's one of our fastest growing regions for us right now is Asia, and it's not because we're selling more consoles in Asia, but through cloud and PC we're finding more users. Year-over-year, the fastest kind of platform is cloud. That's growing the fastest. And those are players like you were talking about your friend in the UK. We were never going to catch that person with our console, so let's find them in a way that works. And it's better for Indiana Jones, it's better for Xbox.
That's a good show. Now, as we mentioned earlier, this is the second time you're... because there is such a ridiculous volume coming this year just from yourselves alone, forget everything else third party. Have you guys got a specific strategy in mind or a roadmap in terms of genre variety or anything like that, or is it just whatever the teams are doing, they're doing and it's all gonna come out whenever?
No, it's such a good topic. Matt Booty and I talk about Age of Mythology. We talked about this a little bit when we moved it. Between Call of Duty Black Ops, which we thought was just going to be an awesome release with Black Ops 6 and the team, it was like you didn't want to be around that. More time, so that was a... but it was really about planning the portfolio. And I think we're still working on that. Obviously when we stand up at Showcase and show the games that are Dev Direct... and like those are the dates that we're committed to. But when we look forward, we definitely want to make sure that the games have the right amount of room, both from a genre perspective, whether it's add-on DLC like Vessel of Hatred for D4, Shattered Space for Starfield, or a full game. And it's nice to be able to have kind of more cards than we've ever had to play, and to be able to play them at the right times. But the studios are really the ones that enable that, and they're just doing really great work.
I am though, so I'm looking forward to... I always buy it, but I always end up going, hmm, open world games, I get fatigue. Which is funny because that segues nicely. One of the things I read earlier this year was, and we've seen it from teams that made Grounded, where these developer groups are splitting off and figuring out something on their own, and then boom, suddenly you've got a relatively low-risk product from a small team that suddenly does great, like Grounded, 12 guys. Do you feel that that is a strategy that is going to be pursued more from Xbox? Because I look back at Hellblade 2, that was a more boutique, smaller, beautiful in presentation but a smaller release. I think South of Midnight is a lower priced release. Twitter or all these other things that are asking us to focus on this and not play games. So smaller games are really helpful to me, especially as a dad with two kids. I want an eight hour, one and done campaign. Is that a big focus for you?
Yeah, you know, I said years ago and I kind of got some tomatoes thrown at me about the impact that first-party games have in our industry. And it was really this struggle that I saw for the business results. And there's obviously been huge successes for single player games, there's no doubt. But part of our reason for trying to get a subscription going was to allow us to also support games that have a beginning, middle, and end. I think the synergies between... I want to play a game, indie is not a small game, but like say Indiana Jones, and then when I... like that's where the business model has... it's not easy to do that. Not every story is told in that way, not every game kind of supports that or creative idea supports that business model. And I love the fact that we can go and, when I look at what Double Fine's working on next, when I think about a team like Compulsion, these aren't the biggest teams and they don't want to be massive thousand-person teams. And we want them to be able to do great work. And so I want to create a platform that can support that. And I think it's an important part of our industry because not every story is going to be 100 hours long, and not every game is gonna have some kind of mechanic that has a currency and everything else. Some games just tell a story.
Patrons that support us incredibly. And we reached out to them before you were going to jump on and said, look, we're going to try and get Phil on, so if you want to pop a few questions in, let us know. But before I get to those Patreon questions, I've got a bone to pick with you. Now, back in August, you were in Germany at Gamescom. We were also in Germany at Gamescom at that time, and you were gracious enough to respond to my Twitter DMs as we were trying to organize a meet up. Now, you've been on our show twice, but you stood me up in Germany.
I think it's legit. I think you got a legit complaint with me.
Jason Ronald was great. He caught up with us.
