Why not? He forced Kinect into the box and overcharged for a noticeably weaker console by $100. He created an idiotic plan to limit trade and resell of used physical copies of games which the industry entirely rejected. All these negatives followed Xbox One into the next gen and stained the Xbox brand. Who else are you going to blame for the shitshow that was Xbox One?
Mattrick was a jerk, snob, and messed up a lot of things. But he did at
least make sure XBO had exclusive new games on Day 1, including genuine showcases like Ryse (which STILL looks great today even on a base XBO).
What did Phil Spencer do to that degree? Apparently, Falconeer was enough in his opinion (no slight against the game, but it's not anywhere near the level of a Ryse, Dead Rising 4, or Killer Instinct).
If there's one criticism that can be fairly levied at Spencer, it's WRT lack of any genuine 1P exclusives at launch for Series, or even through 2021 (not counting crossgen titles). For perspective their first next-gen only, non crossgen exclusive (not a 1P game, tho) was Crossfire X.
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yeah :/...
Apple has a cult like following , if tomorrow they go all in on gaming which I highly doubt they will , they will be a feirce competitor for Microsoft and Sony. Their MacBooks and ipads are more powerful or almost on par with PS5 /series
Based on what? Just TF? What about pixel fillrate? Texture fillrate? Geometry culling? Triangle rasterization? RT BVH traversal intersection tests? GPU clock speeds (influencing cache speeds)? Half-precision? Quarter-precision? Feature sets? Game dev-friendly API tools, libraries, support?
Just because their new GPUs have a lot of raw computational ability doesn't mean they're better at high-fidelity gaming than PS5 or Series X, or potentially even Series S (depending on what new Apple device you're comparing it to). And from the looks of things Sony & Microsoft have notably better API tools, libraries, and resource support for AAA game development than anything Apple can provide.
MS weak point marketing outside the US. how do you build brand again with weak marketing ? even GP which their Ace plan don't have any marketing.
Actually MS and tons of other people advertise GamePass seemingly all the time. They've even got some funny throwback '90s music video parodies as advertisement for the service.
The real issue IMO is that Microsoft does almost zero marketing for the actual games in the service, let alone deeper dives into those games. They released Hivebusters for Gears 5 as a stealth drop. Psychonauts 2 got pretty much no marketing/advertising whatsoever at release time. Flight Sim was a stealth drop in GamePass, etc.
If you wanted to know if any of this stuff were coming, you'd have to of already been in the know and actively following their releases. Also, Microsoft's budget for advertising through traditional media is practically dead and, again, the few adverts they do put out just focus around GamePass the service and less so the games that make the service which should be front-and-center of that advertising.
Compare that with Sony's advertising and it's literal night-and-day difference, and I don't buy the excuse of divergent business strategies. Simple fact is, Microsoft/Xbox's advertising strategy is flawed if you're a core gamer and want more detailed info on the actual games (not just the service), and it's
extremely flawed if you're a casual who only learns about Xbox stuff every once in a while (
especially if that's through traditional advertising avenues).