Starfield delay was "disaster situation" that left a "huge hole" in Microsoft’s games lineup
Leaked court documents from the FTC v. Microsoft case show Microsoft's head of gaming Phil Spencer admitting that the Starfield delay was a bad situation for the company's Xbox Game Pass lineup.
As Eurogamer reports, in an email sent in May 2022 to colleagues, Spencer called the delay of Bethesda's sci-fi RPG a «disaster situation», and said that the lack of clarity on the launch date for Redfall and Stalker 2 at the time — the latter of which has been impacted by the ongoing war in Ukraine — left «a huge hole with our games lineup both for platform marketing/differentiation and our Game Pass content».
«We keep talking about a [big] AAA a quarter [sic] in the service [Game Pass] and it feels like we are likely to go through a gap of almost 16 months between big exclusive launches on our platform,» Spencer said. «This is really a disaster situation for us given all we've invested in content across studios at our GP content fund.»
He went on to say that he thinks Microsoft and the team should get better at portfolio planning for its games with «real honesty on dates» after setting «a very high bar in 2021 on quality and pacing», but going into 2022 with no big exclusives launching «is a portfolio planning miss that we can't afford».
«We have to all understand that the situation we are in now is a failure of our planning and production execution,» Spencer added.
The email continued, with Spencer expressing his frustration about the situation: «It will be very obvious to the community with both our lack of updates on so many games and lack of clarity on almost everything in the show that we are out of position.
»We've dealt with difficult situations before, we'll do it again. I'm frustrated by where we are, but we'll get through
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