Starfield delay was “disaster situation” that left a “huge hole” in Microsoft’s games lineup
Spencer suggested adding Dark Souls to Game Pass to fill the gap
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Leaked court documents from theFTC v. Microsoft caseshowMicrosoft’s head of gaming Phil Spencer admitting that theStarfielddelay was a bad situation for the company’sXbox Game Passlineup.
As Eurogamerreports, in an email sent in May 2022 to colleagues, Spencer called thedelay of Bethesda’s sci-fi RPGa “disaster situation”, and said that the lack of clarity on the launch date forRedfallandStalker 2at the time - the latter of which has been impacted by the ongoing war in Ukraine - left “a huge hole with our games lineup both for platform marketing/differentiation and our Game Pass content”.
“We keep talking about a [big] AAA a quarter [sic] in the service [Game Pass] and it feels like we are likely to go through a gap of almost 16 months between big exclusive launches on our platform,” Spencer said. “This is really a disaster situation for us given all we’ve invested in content across studios at our GP content fund.”
He went on to say that he thinksMicrosoftand the team should get better at portfolio planning for its games with “real honesty on dates” after setting “a very high bar in 2021 on quality and pacing”, but going into 2022 with no big exclusives launching “is a portfolio planning miss that we can’t afford”.
“We have to all understand that the situation we are in now is a failure of our planning and production execution,” Spencer added.
The email continued, with Spencer expressing his frustration about the situation: “It will be very obvious to the community with both our lack of updates on so many games and lack of clarity on almost everything in the show that we are out of position.
“We’ve dealt with difficult situations before, we’ll do it again. I’m frustrated by where we are, but we’ll get through that. Most important is building a winning plan. Let’s get on that.”
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Notably, when Spencer talked about the importance of third-party game launches on Game Pass and which games it should aim for, Xbox head of ecosystem Sarah Bond responded: “While I don’t love the impetus for this discussion, I do love that we are doing this and agree we can get much better and more integrated in how we think of this.”
Bond then listed a collection of third-party games to potentially add to the service,includingBaldur’s Gate 3,Star Wars Jedi: Survivor,Mortal Kombat 1,Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga,Dying Light 2,City Skylines 2,Red Dead Redemption 2,Gotham Knights, andSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Spencer responded to Bond’s list and even spoke about how it could go about getting FromSoftware’s library of games added to Game Pass followingElden Ring’s massive success.
“Another option with the hit factor aroundElden Ringis to try to go get all of theDark Soulsgames and make a push with From and anElden Ringupsell,” he said, to which Bond replied: “Like that one. Will do.”
As previously mentioned, this email chain was from May 2022, and none of FromSoftware’s titles have yet to make it ontoXbox Game Pass, so it’s unclear if that is still a goal for Microsoft.
There’s even more information to unpack from the leaked court documents. According to a presentation,Microsoft plans to release its next Xbox console in 2028, while other documents show a breakdown of a number of games in the works, suchplans to remasterThe Elder Scrolls 4: OblivionandFallout 3.
For more, here’s our list of the bestXbox Series X games, as well as ourbest Xbox Game Pass titleson offer.
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