Phil Spencer 'All in' on Xbox Studios Revisiting Older, Owned IP

ign.com:

Phil Spencer really, really wants someone within Xbox Game Studios to make a new Hexen game. First, he wore that Hexen T-shirt at the Xbox Games Showcase earlier this year. And now, he's name-dropping Hexen repeatedly as a franchise he wants someone within Xbox to revisit somehow. But, Spencer notes, only if the team doing so is genuinely passionate about it — or whatever other older franchise they're plucking from Xbox's catalog to refresh.

Speaking on the Official Xbox Podcast, Spencer spoke on the company's strategy for how it allocates its owned catalog of IPs to its development studios, reassuring that Xbox isn't out there compelling anyone to revive older franchises they aren't interested in. He said he frequently meets with Xbox teams to learn what they're passionate about, and is happy to let teams dig into the Xbox vault for franchises they're personally interested in.

"I just don't think that a team working on something that isn't their passion leads to the best result," Spencer said. "So I might have my list of things from my memories and history that I want to see made again. Everybody will.

"When I just think about, not just about Activision-Blizzard-King, you add in Bethesda, you add in Xbox's history, Rare... the amount of franchises that we now have in our portfolio is kind of inspiring, it's daunting, I feel that we have to be a great custodian for the content that we touch. These are memories for people on different platforms, different decades, and I want to make sure that when we're going back and visiting something that we do it with our complete ability — a motivated team that wants to go work on something and make a difference, not just create something for financial gain or create something for a PR