Phil Spencer Talks Activision Blizzard King + Xbox! What's Next For Call of Duty On PlayStation

Yeah, I think the regulatory process, let's just say it took so long. This whole thing felt like the goal itself was to get through the regulatory process, but that's just the beginning. In fact, this evening I'm flying to Stockholm to see the King team. It's a team I don't know that well, so I'm really excited to do that.

We're going to see them in Stockholm and then London. They have a couple other locations, I don't know that we're going to make it to all the locations, but I'm really excited about seeing the teams. The following week I'm going down to Southern California, I'll go to Blizzard, I'll go to Sledgehammer Games. To me, when I think about where we're trying to go, it always starts with teams. The teams have to feel motivated, they have to feel inspired, they have to feel safe, they have to feel heard. I think that's super important.

Their passion, their commitment to the things that they build, the way they run their games, that comes from the culture of who they are. I've said it many times, I think teams ship their culture in everything they do, whether it's implicit or explicit. You can kind of feel the dynamic on a team and the creative output, whether it's a band, whether it's a writer, whatever. So spending time with the teams and getting to hear from them where they're going, I have some of my own opinions of course, but they're just opinions. This is about getting time with the teams, thinking about where we're trying to go, then looking at the games and where we are and the roadmap. That's really where the work is, and I'm very, very excited about that.

When we finished Bethesda, there was this great moment we were able to put a bunch of the back catalog games and celebrate their history. And I wondered about that too, like I honestly wondered how fast we would get Call of Duty, the other Diablo games, all these games inside Game Pass. And this isn't a spoiler because this has been known already. We're talking 2024, probably first quarter 2024. The first big Game Pass announcement of 2024 will likely be like, hey, by the way, here's all the Call of Duty games in Game Pass. And the dope part about that is a lot of the Call of Duty games on Xbox, I see on PlayStation or PC, on Xbox those servers have been fixed and they're playable. The truth of the matter is with Activision Blizzard King, the regulatory process took so long and frankly there was a lot of uncertainty in that process up until really a week before we closed, or the week of when the CMA finally came down to their decision, that we weren't able to get in and work with Activision and Blizzard in this case on that back catalog work. So now we're starting that work. But there is work, and I know the Activision Twitter handle did put out something that talked about 2024. I think that's accurate. There's no secret celebration drop coming in the next couple of weeks. There's not. Definitely when we think about the new games that are there, I would be straight with people. If we were going to put them in the back catalog, I would tell people. And I know there'll be some disappointment about that. This acquisition is definitely long term. So the fact that we're not hitting day one with a bunch of games dropping into Game Pass is a little bit of a downer, but I'm very excited about the future, and I just want to be straight with people that that's where we are.

It's very interesting getting humbled by your reaction time going down every single year. It's very clear that I count my reaction time in like tens of seconds now. People are getting really good at the game.

I think PC players, PC is unique. And I want it to feel like it's part of the overall gaming platform that Xbox focuses on. We've been on that journey for a while with our first party and our Xbox app on PC. There's a lot of work for us to continue to do there. For Call of Duty players on PlayStation and in the future on Nintendo, I want you to feel 100% part of the community. I don't want you to feel like there's content you're missing out on, skins you're missing out on, timing that you're missing out on. That's not the goal. The goal is 100% parity across all platforms as much as we can for launching content. I say as much as we can on parity because clearly some platforms have resolution and frame rate differences just based on performance. But resolution and frame rate differences, that can happen depending on the systems. It can't be 100% parity because at the end of the day, PlayStation will still have some advantage when it comes to things like haptic feedback. If you play Call of Duty on Xbox and then play on PlayStation, you would notice a vast difference when you play. Those triggers alone, and I know Xbox leaked documents that they're going to have a controller that's more closer to the PS5 controller, but there's no parity right now. But there's nothing else. We have no goal of trying to use Call of Duty to get you to buy an Xbox console. You should, but I want the Call of Duty Nation to feel supported across all platforms. We've been on the other side of some of those skins and times, even this beta, it wasn't on Xbox the first week. I don't think that helps the community. I don't think that helps the game. So the focus is, if you're a PlayStation player, Nintendo player, PC player, or an Xbox console player, I want you to feel like 100% part of the Call of Duty Nation.

The first thing, as I kind of mentioned before, is to go spend time with the teams. Because I just don't think that a team working on something that isn't their passion leads to the best result. So I might have my list of things from my memories and history that I want to see made again, everybody will. When I think about not just Activision Blizzard King, you add in Bethesda, you add in Xbox history, Rare, the amount of franchises that we now have in our portfolio is... It's daunting. I feel that we have to be a great custodian for the content we touch. These are memories from people on different platforms, different decades. We need to make sure that when we're going back and visiting something, we do it with our complete ability, a motivated team that wants to go work on something and make a difference, not just create something for financial gain or create something for a PR announcement and not deliver on the product. So I'm going to start with the teams and what they are passionate about. That's why I'm excited to go on these visits. And then we'll look at it. I think we've done an okay job as Xbox, I don't think we've done an A-plus job on looking at our franchises and revisiting them. It's always a tradeoff between what do you do that's new and going back and doing something. I do think with Game Pass we have the ability to maybe pick a couple franchises every year and almost do like a revisited. I just made up that term, so it's not a brand, it's not on a box. But it is about things like Hexen, just because I remember playing it as a kid. I have no plan for that. But I do think when you look across all the franchises that are a part of our teams, there's an opportunity for us to go back, even if it's just to recognize the moment and what those things meant in gaming's history, and do something right with it, make it available to people through Game Pass. I think there's an opportunity. There's not a plan for that, but there's an opportunity if people want to, if teams want to go back and revisit some of the things that we have and do a full focus on it, I'm going to be all in on that. Because I think there's just an amazing trove of things to go touch again. It doesn't have to just be about Activision Blizzard. When you look across all the portfolio, I think about things like the Quake 2 remaster that just came out. I thought that was awesome. They did a real good job revisiting a game, making it current, but also not leaving the history behind. So I'd love to see more things like that.

I hadn't really thought about that question specific on Activision and Blizzard. You know, there's some moments in Activision's history. You mentioned Tony Hawk, you mentioned Guitar Hero, things like Skylanders, Tony Hawk, where the teams kind of innovated outside of expectation. What do you mean I'm going to carry a plastic guitar and plug it into my console and play? That's never going to work, until it worked. And then everybody said, well of course that was going to work. Skylander kind of the same way. For me personally though, when I think about the franchises, I kind of go back to things like some of the old Infocom things that were... You just asked for me personally, part of my youth, the text adventure Zork, those kind of things. I think about King's Quest, I thought they did a really nice job. But the Sierra catalog, the Infocom catalog, just because of my age, those things speak to me because they were moments in my gaming career, my gaming experience that really meant something. And I love those. When you think about Blizzard and all the things that they've done, amazing franchises. Starcraft, it was in the video that the teams did, which I know there's been some discussion about should we have done a video for that. And Crash Bandicoot, isn't it wild that Crash Bandicoot, which was once considered the PlayStation mascot, is an IP owned by Microsoft? But there's just some amazing franchises in there. Most important is that we treat them with the respect that they deserve and we don't turn it into some way for us just to have a PR moment or something else.

My goal as head of Xbox, I've been here over 20 years, I want Xbox to be a great brand, a great community for people over the next decades to come. So when I've thought about what do we need to have in our portfolio and our capability as a team to ensure 30 years from now Xbox is bigger and stronger than it is today, we've got to be relevant on mobile. There's just no way to really see the future without being on the platform that most of the planet plays on. The business models are different, the whole dynamic of how you distribute, how you find games is different. So when I was looking at that, I needed to find a team that's had amazing success for us to learn from. So literally, Amy Hood, who's the CFO of Microsoft, and I went through a list of who are the most accomplished publishers in the mobile space. And most people wouldn't have expected, I think I didn't, that Activision would have been as high with the King work, as well as the Call of Duty Mobile work, Warzone stuff that they've been doing, Diablo Immortal. And so I want to go learn from those teams because I think it's critical for us to deliver on the full promise of over two billion people playing. The opportunity to reach more people.