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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-08-10-putting-the-gamer-at-the-centre-of-our-decisions-phil-spencer-on-xboxs-big-year

Well, the amount of exclusives is amazing. Sony's got quite a quiet Q4 as well. You're still lagging behind in sales, though. What's it going to take to catch up?

Phil Spencer: Honestly, I think it's about growing Xbox. Sony's had great success with PlayStation, they've earned that success over multiple decades of building a great product. Kudos to them for their market position. All I can do is focus on Xbox, and I love that. I love our fans and the partners we have. We're growing Xbox year on year, we're bigger than we were this time in the 360 generation, so generation over generation we're in a better spot, year over year we're in a better spot. We're seeing more people online, more games being sold, more consoles being sold. So generally I feel good about the trajectory we're on.

We've got more work to do in central Europe, there's no doubt about that, especially in southern Europe and areas where we've traditionally not been that strong. Coming to Gamescom is really important, to make sure we're here this year, we're doing a press briefing and showing new fresh content, working with studios here on delivering content that helps to build culturally diverse content, and having genre diversity in what's coming out is also a big focus of ours. People buy game consoles to play games, and attracting European gamers is going to be through the content - whether it's deals on things like FIFA, or games like Halo Wars which is a strategy game and that can resonate really well in Europe, to Forza, that always does well in Europe, and that team continues to deliver. It's a long-term endeavour, and it's something we're committing to.

Do you think that in one, two years you can catch up?

Phil Spencer: I honestly don't goal the team on how many units Sony sells. I think about what we're going to do, and how many Xbox customers we have across 360, Xbox One and Windows - thinking about the combined community of people on Xbox and playing those games, and that number's never been bigger.

There are ways to sell consoles by losing more money on hardware and building an unnatural business construct that I'd never want to do - at the end, when people make a commitment to Xbox and the consoles they buy, the games they buy, they want to know that Microsoft and Xbox is in it for the long run. To sacrifice the long term for any short term gain doesn't make any sense. I really focussed on our first-party investment, and you see it showing up in 2015 and 2016. Next year's line-up is pretty incredible, and we haven't even talked about all the games that are coming next year. Investments in first-party, there's more risk involved, and people can say it's more challenging building first party investments, and you could say it's easier doing third-party deals, but they're critical to our business, and we're in this for the long run.

 

Interesting change from last year