Xbox boss Phil Spencer had a Q&A during the 2015 GeekWire Summit, and revealed a ton of interesting facts about the creation process of Xbox One and also answered the question whether he thinks Xbox One will be able to beat PlayStation 4:
"You know, I don't know. You know, the length of the generation... They [Sony] have a huge lead and they have a good product. I love the content, the games line-up that we have."
Spencer says the botched launch of the Xbox One really had an impact on his team:
"One thing that probably I didn't realise as much as I should have when I started in this role was the impact that the launch had on our team here in Redmond, the Xbox team. Because it's easy to read the blogs and the sites and my Twitter feed and see what the customers think of our brand and our product, but the team in Redmond took as much of a hit as the external community did around the launch. And I sit back and I think about an [organisation] of thousands of people, you're down in the organisation and some words and some actions from executives kinda just trash all the work that you've done over the last three years, many weekends and nights, and you start to question why am I doing this? Why am I working so hard when a few crass comments can actually position our product more directly than any work that the team was doing?"
Beating Sony isn't top priority for Microsoft, but gaining as many customers as possible is. Spencer explains how he has worked with the team to give them the confidence back, and how they constantly surprise them:
"Being very forthright with them about where we were and our ability to do things like beat Sony was critical. What I've seen in the 18 months that I've been in the role is the team is getting more work done in a day than I would expect.
"Every time I sit down and I do a product review, mostly every time, the team comes in with surprise and delight around the momentum that they have, more than I'm able to add. And when I see that transformation of a team that's questioning the leadership of the organisation to a team that's motivated by the customers that we have and their ability to delight them, I see a team that's making amazing progress. [Backwards compatibility] was one. We didn't know back compat would work. We started it. A few ninja engineers went off and figured it out, how do you go from PowerPC to X86 and translate game code that's about as time-critical as any piece of code that you would want in terms of its performance, and they got it done. So I would never question the ability of our organisation, but I'll say we're not motivated by beating Sony, we're motivated by gaining as many customers as we can."
In the interview, Spencer also says they fundamentally lost the trust of the most loyal fans with Xbox One, and says they are still recovering from the heavy hits they got early on:
"Whether it's always-on, used games, whatever the feature was, we lost the trust in them that they were at the centre of our decision-making process. Were we building a product for us, or were we building a product for the gamers? And as soon as that question came into people's minds and they looked at anything, whether it was the power of our box, our launch line-up, microtransactions, any of the features that you talked about, what you find is very quickly you lose the benefit of the doubt. You lose your customer's assumption that the reason you're building your product is to delight them and not just build a better and more maybe manipulative product.
And that really set with me going through the launch and just watching the reaction, as you said, of the most loyal fans, people that had Xbox tattooed on their arm. And them coming to us almost in tears because they felt like the direction we were going with the product didn't include them. Have we recovered? I feel really good about the position and the product and the brand right now, but I was at the Gamestop Manager's Meeting about three weeks ago and I'm sitting with 5,000 Gamestop managers in Las Vegas and they'd come up and they still have customers that walk in the store that think that the Xbox One won't play used games."
The Q&A is really interesting and, as usual with Spencer, surprisingly candid. Take a look at it over at link.
Thanks, Videogamer.