"I'm going to take responsibility for those decisions, good ones and bad ones."
Speaking during the latest IGN Podcast Unlocked, Microsoft's Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has reflected at length on the Xbox One's early months and, in particular, its specifications and entertainment features.
During the discussion, he described how it felt to work on the Xbox One during the fan backlash over its original online requirements and focus on entertainment apps, seemingly at the expense of new games. "The year of the announce of Xbox, E3 2013, the toll it took on some of the internal team members was probably higher than I anticipated or many of us did," Spencer recalled.
As you're hopefully well aware at this juncture, Microsoft ultimately dropped the online check-in feature. It has also altered the Xbox One to run without Kinect plugged in, and has now released an edition of the console that doesn't include the peripheral.
E3 2014 was a comparatively announcement-stuffed affair, with precious little talk of TV or broader media applications. "I remember after E3 this year, where I think we had a better E3 but we could always do better - the number of people who walked up in the halls at work, who were visibly emotional about re-energising their pride in the product that they'd worked on... that meant a lot to me," Spencer continued.
He was frank about his contribution to the original vision for the console. "I see it sometimes on Twitter and other places, where people want to call me out as somebody who was at the leadership table when decisions were made for Xbox One, and that's absolutely true.
"I've never tried to wash my hands or distance myself from my role on the Xbox One leadership team through the announcement of the console, E3 2013 - I was there, and I'm not trying to create some kind of false history that makes me look better, to say I wasn't there, I wasn't involved. I'm going to take responsibility for those decisions, absolutely, good ones and bad ones. I have to, otherwise I don't have any credibility in what I do going forward.
"I wouldn't trust me if all of a sudden I tried to say 'well, I was asleep during those meetings'. It would be silly. I was there."
Asked what he would have done differently, Spencer zeroed in on the decision to talk about Xbox One's entertainment features before showing off the majority of its games. "I think we get permission as a platform to focus on entertainment when we're a great gaming platform. And before we've earned that permission, and we go out and try to explain to people that we're an entertainment platform, without checking for all the Xbox fans out there that this is going to be the place they want to play games - I think that's where we confused people."
He was reluctant, however, to concede any ground with regard to the console's technical specifications and pricing. "I know the people that make those decisions, [but] I don't know the realities of the situations when they made those decisions. So it's easy for me to sit back now and say 'OK, we would have built a three teraflops box and sold it for 99 dollars', but I don't know.
"I don't know what trade-offs they were making, cause we didn't make all the decisions as the leadership team. I was making content decisions. So I think it's a little unfair for me to go back and kind of cherry-pick a certain decision like 'hey what RAM do we pick' or the ESRAM thing, or the HDMI in, or what we've done with Kinect, whatever it is, and just say 'oh, I'm all-knowing at this point and knowing where we are now, I would have changed these decisions'."
Microsoft has, however, made changes to the Xbox One's operating system to allow developers to get more juice out of it - in particular, it's now possible to utilise GPU resources that were initially set aside for Kinect. "I will say that the work at the platform team is done to give as much power in the hands of the developers as we can," noted Spencer. "It has made a tremendous impact in the last six months, and I'm really proud of that.
"And the box, from a reliability standpoint - I mean, I lived through red rings on Xbox 360 and other things - has been significantly better than we were at the launch of 360, which has been great. I'm not ashamed of the hardware that we have anyway, and if somebody asks me 'Should I go buy an Xbox One' I can definitely tell them from the content that we have and the platform that we have, and the services that we have, and for the hardware that we have, 'yes'."
http://www.totalxbox.com/82158/we-confused-people-phil-spencer-on-xbox-ones-specs-and-media-features/
