There has been much debate about what actually happened when Microsoft suddenly announced on Friday that Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond would be leaving the Xbox team, with new management in place as of yesterday. As you might expect, there's been a bunch of conflicting claims from insiders who say they know what's going on, and now the usually trustworthy editor Tom Warren from The Verge has shared his intel.
He says that Phil Spencer and Microsoft had been prepping for his departure for a while, but the plan was to announce it this week. Unfortunately, the information was leaked, so they rushed to make everything public to prevent rumours from spreading. That said, there was an interesting detail in the press release about the change in leadership, namely that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, new gaming chief Asha Sharma, the promoted Matt Booty, and of course Phil Spencer himself gave their views on the changes, while Sarah Bond was completely absent.
After all, she was the head of Xbox, and it's remarkable that she is gone from one day to the next in this way. Warren believes that Bond and her team were as surprised as we were by this announcement, and also writes that she was not entirely popular among her colleagues. Among other things, she is credited with the highly criticised "This is an Xbox" campaign that ran last year, which apparently "offended many Xbox employees internally":
"Microsoft delivered a marketing campaign that signaled people didn't need to buy an Xbox console anymore. The message was that 'you don't need an Xbox to play Xbox,' because games were available through Xbox Cloud Gaming on TVs."
Warren also writes that "most of the current and former Xbox employees I've spoken to in recent days are relieved that Bond is leaving Microsoft" because she was allegedly "tough to work with," although several have stated that she was very good at reaching agreements with companies and developers.
This is also said to be the reason why - as we reported over the weekend - the new gaming boss Sharma promised "the return of Xbox" on her first day and also wrote that we can look forward to "a renewed commitment to Xbox starting with console." Bond's strategy is simply heading for the compost heap, and there will now be a new direction going forward.
We can add that the usually reliable Windows Central says it has sources backing up that Spencer's departure was actually planned (even though it seems to have been revealed in a hurry because of leaks). They write:
"Our own sources tell us that Spencer has indeed been coordinating his retirement with Microsoft for several months."
Basically, it sounds like Spencer seems to have been getting ready to leave, while Bond was just caught off guard and might even have been sacked after being questioned internally about her Xbox campaigns.
What do you think about this?