Starfield's delay was "disaster situation" for Xbox Game Pass, Phil Spencer said
Phil Spencer admitted the hole in Game Pass left by Starfield's delay was a «disaster situation» and suggested FromSoftware's Dark Souls games to plug the gap following the success of Elden Ring, among other third-party releases.
Today's enormous leak of internal Microsoft documents includes a particularly candid email from Spencer sent in May 2022, revealing his frustration around «a huge hole with our games lineup». That was due to Starfield's delay, «not a tonne of clarity on the launch date of Redfall», and Stalker 2 development impacted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
«We keep talking about a big AAA a quarter 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 lamented.
«This is really a disaster situation for us given all we've invested in content across studios at our GP content fund.»
He continued: «I think we need to get much better at overall portfolio planning on our games with real honesty on dates.
»We set a very high bar in 2021 on quality and pacing of content which was awesome to see. But to come off of that year with no big exclusives launching in 2022 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 later admitted in the email: «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.»
He concluded: «We've dealt with difficult situations before, we'll do it again. I'm frustrated by where we are, but we'll get through that. Most important is building a
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