Xbox Boss On Complimenting Competitors: 'You're Looking For The Evil Phil'

I am sure that Phil wants to try and keep the status quo and knows the importance, the legacy etc of all these companies that have made gaming what it is today.

We know he enjoys playing games on Playstation and Switch too - maybe hopes one day they can have Game Pass on their hardware too...

Oh, Phil loves his gamers... as long as they tow the company line. If you have a different opinion, he brands you as a hater with "no place in Xbox." He talks out of both sides of his mouth.

Big fan of Phil but he's definitely an evil maniac on the quiet

I don't see anyone who isn't a low-key sociopath getting so high up in the business world.

That said, I wouldn't worry about people finding the 'evil you'. Those who want there to be one, will invent one.

@themightyant It was one of his many interviews. This isn't the first time he has spoke on the subject of praising Sony.

But no, "hate speech," is not a good reason at all as it is used to bludgeon people who simply don't agree under the false guise of hate speech.

He used the term "hate" when he downplayed the console wars. I don't know anybody that can pretend to be a different person 24/7. He seems genuine to me. Not everybody has to be evil and I know important people who aren't. There is an absurd level of bitterness and wasted energies going anywhere on the internet.

@themightyant @isturbo1984 https://mobile.twitter.com/XboxP3/status/1372231284966051842

Are we talking this?, because this seems very reasonable. And actually is 100% against hate speech and not just disagreeing with an opinion.

@Richnj

Yeah, I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. How could you disagree with what Phil said here? Lmao

@Rural-Bandit I agree with you wholeheartedly. People that see evil in others with no reason is because they have The Evil Within. Wordplay but true.

a lot of gamers are young or deluded, and literally think that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are blood rivals, and hate each other, and that there's a war. they expect fanboy behavior from adults. it's ok to ignore those gamers lol

@Rural-Bandit If he didn't take things easy he wouldn't be able to live like that. I'm not the best under pressure (in real life) so I always try to learn a thing or two from this kind of people for my daily life.

@isturbo1984
And how is that different then any other executive in the industry? You can go back with any person on the planet and find inconsistencies and about faces with what they have said over time. That is really an disingenuous, zero value comment.

Iwata is good
Gamers: He is a good person, he cares about us!
Phil is good
Gamers: No! He wants to destroy competition, he is evil!

@Rural-Bandit Yeah, he was right! 👍👌

He seems OK, but nobody in his position in a company the size of MS got there without stepping on peoples backs on the way up, and if it were needed and required for his business I'll wager he could be just as evil as anyone else you could name.

Fortunately he has no need to resort to those kind of behaviours and I'm sure he's genuinely happy playing the benevolent benefactor, but there will be many more faces to him than the one he shows publicly.

Still, at least he IS someone who wants to be seen as the good guy. I get the impression that someone like Bobby gets a kick out of being portrayed as the evil tyrant he is..

@Rural Bandit Your dad spoke wise words. I grew up well before the net, and I cant see that connectivity has done much to improve peoples social awareness intelligence or happiness at all, in many respects I think people had better values before....

@Rural-Bandit There are some serious games coming to Xbox in the following years, many of them new IPs or gigantic sequels. It's exciting!

He's been a revolution to the games industry I think! Certainly doing things differently and is ace at dropping Easter eggs. Like an Xbox One S on his shelf during media interviews before it's release.
I like him and his approach and what he's done. Game Pass is flipping excellent value.

@Titntin I think that people have worse values nowadays because basically they don't care about anyone but themselves and their social needs are apparently satisfied by having virtual interactions. Helping and loving others is the true happiness.

@Banjo- @Rural-Bandit I said in another thread, that I'd love to get rid of the internet, cell phones, airlines, and everything that made the sample size of population larger and the world smaller. Too much changed happened too quickly in a quarter century and within one generation the world changed 3 times over and will change again. It's not possible to keep any kind of social order amidst that.

But even more than the internet, I think there's a bigger underlying problem. The concept of family life being decimated, the minimum requirement of dual incomes for most people....it made it so kids are no longer raised by parents as families, kids raise each other under the eye of government/corporate monitors. The internet is as much a symptom of that as a cause. Older generations were raised by parents, not for-profit businesses or government bureaucrats with social engineering agendas churning out a new generation uniformly loyal to and unquestioning of their ideals. Families are where they learned ethics and values in the past, and where diversity of views came from instead of an unnatural polar homogeneity. Modern kids, have that much less. And even in my time that was largely eroding. Ethics has become, and I don't mean figuratively, but literally, "opinion" and a measure of what you can be punished for, not an evaluation of what you should do. Right and wrong at first was redefined from "is it right" to "is it legal" to "is there a loophole that can make it legal to the letter of the law?" Among the younger, how that seem driven more by a programmed ideology it's more about "is it aligned with the ideology" rather than legality or ethics at all. The ideology is right...always. Not too unlike some mid 20-th century populations....

At this point, only cataclysm can fix the problem by resetting society 50, 100 years. I thought the pandemic might actually accomplish that at first....but no, it's somehow accelerated things the opposite direction.

@Titntin To Phil's credit, I don't think he otherwise would have been in the position he's in in a company like that in a normal situation, precisely because he's not the typical corporate double-crossing suit. He more or less accidentally fell into the position because after Matrick decimated the division, everybody else that was a corporate climber up and quit and Phil was the highest ranking person left....so he got the job, which at the time was mostly expected to be a short term formality until the plug was pulled on the whole thing. That's kind of why we lucked out having him in this position. If the corporate rat's hadn't all fled the sinking ship, someone like Phil would never have ended up running a (mostly dead) corporate division of anything. But as it turned out, he got the position by default of being the only one to not quit, but then turned out to be masterfully successful in it and ended up rising higher than his corporate peers ever did.

@armondo36 I honestly don't know how much of it is because gamers are young and expect a war, because gamers are young and view everything as a turf war for their side, or because a lot of gamers are old and remember the 90's where Sega, Sony, and Nintendo really were at war. Sony did whatever they could to cut Sega, and Nintendo...well. Yamauchi treated everything as a war to destroy his rivals. And his partners. Basically everyone that wasn't him or part of his corporate clan in true yakuza fashion.... Of course back then most of the game companies were yakuza connected (Nintendo, Sega, Konami, at least) and were truly at war with each other....

@NEStalgia thanks for the reply, not a history I had considered

The yakuzza thing is a fantastic revelation to me! I had no idea, and I was a keen gamer back then too. I think I might need to read into that - thanks.

@Rural-Bandit So much agreement across the board. And it's terrifying to hear about the "gentrification" in TX as well....I knew it was happening there, but not to that extent. I'm up in the "coastal elite" area to begin with but was outside the major metros....used to be...but they just keep growing like Asimov predicted. The gentrification here over just the past 10 years is surreal. I don't really know where I live, I only know I'm not in any way a part of the world that's around me anymore. All the normal stores people used to go to are gone, and in their place high luxury. Traffic went to total gridlock and total lawlessness. I basically never left home other than work even before the pandemic, and I doubt I ever will again at this point. Even if you fight the traffic, dodge the near misses, and scrape together enough money to live luxury you can't afford, dealing with the people makes even that miserable, and any time I go anywhere I just end up fuming and angry because yet another area I once new is being bulldozed for another 40-70 "luxury carriage homes", a new 5 story high rise (that look like endless prison blocks) with "luxury apartment homes for high earning millennials in the 6-figure bracket" or the restaurants and office parks that stretch the horizon everywhere to support them. Much as I loathe tech and the internet, I'm virtually a slave to it now, as the real world around me no longer exists, the entire world exists through my little virtual window to it. Bring on the meta....plug me in....what is the Matrix.....yay "progress"...

@Titntin Yeah, there's some interesting stories out there. Nintendo itself.... Officially they were of course never connected. They have an odd statement in their publishing contracts that vaguely talks about certifying that you or your employees are not a part of unsavory organizations (translation: We promise we're not yakuza), but Nintendo's own origins and Yamauchi's family history are steeped deep in yakuza culture (they were a hanafuda card maker based in a yakuza-run gambling town..............) Yamauchi himself even looked the part. And certainly acted the part. Guy's got "patriarch" written all over him. We'll never know for sure...but....thinking otherwise is self delusion

Konami and Sega...there's a lot of stories attached to them. The most interesting one I can remember was from an anonymous developer (which may or may not be Kojima but very likely was Kojima based on the details....though there are a few other possible devs that fit the profile) that actually had his family kidnapped and held as collateral for development. According to the anonymous interview, he knew it was the company (presumably Konami if it was Kojima but could have been Sega if it was one of the other possibilities) he rented a crane and purchased one of the company's older arcade cabinets and had it dropped from the crane an smashed it in front of their entry doors in response.

The old school Japanese video game industry is......interesting...... Suddenly the Yakuza series sounds less like a work of fiction and more like a documentary of the upper management....

@Rural-Bandit Yeah, that sounds about right I'd even be fine being a hermit if the would would LET you be a hermit. Working from home should become mandatory except for physical jobs in these congested places. Or at least build freaking trains and busses so that it's not actually MORE crowded than Manhattan. And the taxes should be grandfathered in. You can't expect people to just magically become rich because rich people moved in around them. And forcing people out of their home by simply charging them beyond their means to live where they've always lived sounds like the Spanish Inquisition. Sounds like demanding a Socialist utopia, but demanding that you can't be forced out of your entire way of life or at least ability to stay in place shouldn't really be asking that much. Even the industrial revolution didn't change people's lives at that pace. You can't afford to stay, and you can't afford to move....so you're trapped hoping a comet just hits and solves it. Depressing that it's not just the coastal elite areas, though, TX has, I suppose been becoming honorary coastal elite for quite a while in hindsight.

He's a phony. Plain and simple. Saw his type a thousand times before. All sunshine and sandwiches on the public front, but I have no doubt, to his immediate co workers, he is a difficult, obstinate man who is probably impossible to please.

I take them all with a pinch of salt. That’s the best way. Phil does seem more approachable for media…but select ones he knows won’t push for clear answers on confused issues. He has so many mixed messaging…he’ll tell you he believes in inclusivity and cross play benefits us all, one minute…then try to raise the price of Xbox live gold the next, rather than remove the mp paywall for the install base he ‘values’.
He’s never clear on exclusivity until he actually has to spell it out.
And I always remember him pulling up that PlayStation fanboy who was an Xbox fanboy at the time - crapgamer. Who complained that quantum break was going to PC so why did he buy an Xbox. Now this crapgamer has some terrible takes and is one of the most pathetic sony fanboys now spreading misinformation for clicks…but tbh he had a point. The Xbox one at that time was sold on these games being the only place you could play them…then a few short months later they’re not. So it was a fair question that should have had a better more reasonable answer than mocking

Also, I still firmly believe for all the good he’s done with gamepass’s value so far, his management skills are still lacking. Xbox still fall into the same traps of announcing games far too early and then going gaps without releases, releasing unfinished games, cancelling announced games. Be a nice guy for the media, be a ***** behind closed doors if you want to truly succeed in business.

@NEStalgia Thank you so much for taking the time to write that info - I found it fascinating. Its definitely something I will find out more about..

I couldn't help but read your response about the changing nature of your home environment too, and have real sympathy with your predicament. I'm very vulnerable to covid and haven't been out much in the last two years myself. With both myself and my wife working from home now I can understnd you 'viewing the world through a little virtual box'.

I am perhaps lucky in that I live in England and culturally we don't make changes in the way I've seen in the states. Most building construction is done to last 100's of years (my own house was built in 1973 and is considered a new build where I live!) Even so, I left London 20 years ago to escape the hectic rate of life there (fun when young, not so as you get old).
I now live in a 16th century pirate haven and fishing port and change here comes slowly in way that's not at all stressful, I think you would appreciate the consistency of living here
If your interested do a Google image search on 'Brixham, Devon' and you will get a feel for the vibe!

Thank you for engaging so readily and sharing your thoughts.