… running Xbox 360’s game development first party teams? We ask studio supremo Phil Spencer…

Spencer’s job is straight-forward; easy to explain. All those first-party games for Xbox 360? He’s in charge. As head of Microsoft’s Game Studios, his job is to populate Xbox 360’s content portfolio with compelling interactive entertainment. In simple language, Make Great Games.

I ask him what this actually means? What does his job entail? The games we saw at E3 this week, for example;  can he actually have any influence on those games, so late in the development cycle (he was only recently promoted to the position; previously he ran Microsoft’s European development efforts)?


“Maybe it’s one of my failings in the job,” he says. “I’m not far removed from the games being developed. That’s where my heart is. I’m a gamer. I do play a lot of the games and I’m actively involved in the creative decisions, the technical decisions and the go-to-market planning when we see everything shaping up right away.”

One good sign. Spencer was intimately involved in signing Gears of War to Xbox 360, when it was still a bunch of sketches.

Alas for Spencer, being intimately involved in product means actually going to the places where it’s all being made. “I travel to where the talent is. Those games aren’t being made down the corridor so I go to Raleigh or Dallas or Edmonton. Just going and being in the team environment can tell you a lot about how the game is coming together.”

I wonder if part of his job is being the hard-ass who makes sure targets are hit and deadlines met. After all, some of the studios under his control have been known to run over schedule in the past.

“The industry as a whole is dealing with bigger and bigger teams. The management infrastructure required just to manage a 150 team of people is a function that didn’t exist in games studios five years ago. This person is not an artist, not a developer, not a designer. They are really just there to facilitate so many people working on a single project.

“That evolution of the studios continues because the games we’re building are getting bigger. The pure process of managing that many people working towards a single goal is a learning process. But if you just look at the strict process of getting from concept to a 90% AAA game on the shelf, we feel good about our progress. We’re working out when to make the critical decisions, how much time we should spend planning up front versus at the end and trying to find the quality in the last six months.”

Perfect System

Is there a perfect way of developing a game, or does it rather depend on the team involved?

“You play to the talent. Great games come from great people and from great teams If you could look at Cliff [Bleszinski] and Peter [Molyneux] and Jason Jones; they personify a collective work-style that dictates how a studio works. How they build games is personal, and the last thing anyone wants to do is try to come in and dictate some system.”

“Better to spend time talking to them early on about where we think the challenges are, focusing on finding ways to hit high review scores that we’ve been hitting for the last few years which we’re quite proud of.”