Phil Spencer apologises for ‘disappointing’ Redfall and claims Xbox was expecting better reviews
Xbox boss Phil Spencer has apologised for the launch state of its latest big first-party release, Redfall, and claimed that developer Arkane Austin will work on improvements for the game.
The first major Xbox exclusive from Bethesda launched this week with a number of technical issues and has generally been reviewed poorly, garnering aggregate scores of 62 (Xbox Series X/S) and 58 (PC) on Metacritic.
At the time of publishing, the co-op shooter has user scores of just 2.6 and 1.9 out of ten.
Addressing Redfall’s disappointing reception in a new interview with Kinda Funny Games, Microsoft‘s head of gaming claimed the platform holder did not expect such a negative reception to the game, citing internal mock reviews which allegedly suggested it could have received much higher scores.
“There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community,” Spencer said. “I’ve been a part of it for a long time. I obviously work on Xbox, I’m head of the business, I have a lot of friends and get a lot of feedback, and just to kind of watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I’m disappointed, I’m upset with myself.”
He added: “We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and this is double digits lower than where we thought we would be with this game through [those]. That’s one of the disappointing things: we would never strive to launch a game that we thought was going to review in the low 60s – it’s not part of our goals.
“If you look at our review scores from the past year – and this is not a defence at all – I think the teams have done a better job in upping the level of quality of the games that we’ve shipped… and this game was significantly below our internal metrics compared to where it actually
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