In a first appearance since the launch of Redfall, Xbox Boss Phil Spencer today featured on a Kinda Funny podcast to discuss the state of Xbox moving forward.
Naturally, the discussion quickly moved to Redfall's launch and how Xbox might go about navigating its future releases, in order to avoid similar mistakes with other first party games. In short, Phil says that Xbox "needs to improve" on engagement with its development teams.
"There's games that are in development when we acquire a studio, and there's things that are either really early in development or not even conceived yet, and I think we need to improve on engaging in games that are midway through production when they become part of Xbox."
Phil went on to talk about the additional expectations that come with being an Xbox first party developer, hinting that these expectations may have hurt the public perception of Redfall.
"I do think there's a different expectation for a game, even a team, when you've been third party and all of a sudden you become part of first party. There's a different expectation in terms of how you're going to perform on our console.
I think there's a different competitive set when people look at what this game is and other games that they're going to say 'hey, I want this game to feel as competitive as this other game, on another console platform' in our case."
The Xbox boss also admitted that he and his leadership team "could engage earlier" with their dev teams to try and help them become better integrated into Xbox first party.
"We didn't do a good job early on in engaging with Arkane Austin to really help them understand what it meant to be part of Xbox and part of first party and use some of our internal resources to help them and kind of move along that journey even faster.
We left them to go work on the game, they've a very talented team — I love that team and I still do — and I will totally bet on them to do another great game.
I think we could engage earlier with our different studios."
Clearly, Phil is taking some of the blame here and rightly so - looking at Redfall's launch, it clearly should have arrived in a better state. Like the Xbox Boss himself says though, we too have faith that Arkane can deliver something great with its next Xbox first party title.