Xbox-bossen Phil Spencer deltog i en utfrågning på 2015 GeekWire Summit och berättade flera intressanta detaljer från utvecklingen av Xbox One, och passade även på att besvara frågan om han tror att Xbox One kommer kunna slå Playstation 4 försäljningsmässigt:
"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 säger att den misslyckade lanseringen av Xbox One verkligen hade negativ inverkan på hans 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?"
Att slå Sony är inte Microsofts topprioritet, säger han, utan att få så många spelare som möjligt att välja deras format. Spencer förklarar hur han jobbat med att få tillbaka teamets självförtroende och hur de överraskar honom på daglig basis:
"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."
Under utfrågningen säger Spencer uppriktigt att de förlorade förtroende hos många lojala Xbox-fans med Xbox One, och säger att de fortfarande lider av de smällar de initialt fick ta:
"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."
Utfrågningen är klart intressant och Spencer är som vanligt överraskande ärlig med spelet bakom kulisserna. Kolla in hela på denna länk eller besök VideoGamer.com om du vill ha fler godbitar i skriven form.
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