Phil Spencer has once again spoken on Microsoft’s new direction as both a third party publisher and a game console manufacturer. As it turns out, this all stems from things that he has seen Sony do.
Phil shared this insight in a recent interview with XboxEra. In fact, this all stems all the way back from the FTC regulation of the Activision deal.
As XboxEra host Jon Clarke recalls, Phil vented to the FTC about Sony using the 30 % cut of every Microsoft game sold on the PlayStation to pay for games to be blocked from Xbox.
Jon goes on to argue that in spite of Sony’s tactics using Microsoft’s goodwill to harm them, Microsoft still takes 70 % of the money they make back. And so Jon suggests that they still do benefit well from this multiplatform strategy.
This was Phil’s response:
“It’s maybe not what I was going to say on stand at the time. But yeah, I would love to make all of the money for all of the games that we ship right, like obviously we make more on our own platform. It’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important.
But there are people, whether it’s their libraries on a PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there. And I don’t want to then look at that and say, well, there’s no way that we should be able to build a business there, find fans of our franchises there.
I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore. People were all so invested in where our games are. Let’s just allow more people to play and yes, the 70% that we make on games on other platforms is helpful to us being able to build great portfolios like we showed at the Dev Direct and I hope this will continue to show through the rest of the year.”
It’s certainly easy to clickbait this statement as an indication that Phil’s choice comes to the detriment of Xbox gamers. But we can’t ignore how he came to this decision. Microsoft already owned Zenimax at this point. Phil felt that their goodwill move to keep publishing games like Doom Eternal and Deathloop to PlayStation, not to mention Minecraft, was being rewarded by Sony taking games away from gamers.
Even if you are a PlayStation gamer, one should recognize that this move is harmful to gamers in general. As we now know, it also harms developers, who have now seen that signing up for those exclusivity deals in 2025 can make your game deeply unprofitable, and riskier than they have to be.
Of course, the deep irony of this now is because of the mistakes Sony made of their own volition, they will now be relying on games that are available on multiple platforms to keep PlayStation 5 gamers happy. And as of last December, Microsoft just became the largest third party publisher in the industry.
Phil could pull the rug on Sony tomorrow and make PlayStation 5 gamers suffer without the big slate of Microsoft titles that we know are coming for at least the next two years. But Microsoft Gaming is going multiplatform from a certain conviction, and we all see plainly where Microsoft benefits and is harmed by it. But if Phil holds onto this one long enough, they may very well compel Sony, and maybe even Nintendo, to follow them in this direction in the future.
You can watch the full XboxEra interview with Phil Spencer below.
