Xbox Boss Phil Spencer Apologizes For Redfall's Disastrous Launch
Yesterday on the Kinda Funny channel, Xbox head Phil Spencer publicly addressed the launch of Arkane Austin's multiplayer vampire shooter, Redfall. Spencer in the interview apologized to fans and claimed full responsibility for the state of the launch.
Speaking with the Kinda Funny team in an interview yesterday morning, Spencer stated that he was «disappointed» in the state Redfall was in, and stated that he was «upset» with himself on the results of the launch.
«There's nothing that's more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community,» Spencer said in the interview. «Just to kind of watch the community lost confidence, be disappointed — I'm disappointed. I'm upset with myself. I kind of revist our process. I think back to the announcement of 60 frames per second, and then we weren't shipping 60 frames per second. That was kind of our punch in the chin, rightfully, a couple weeks ago. And then seeing the game come out, and the critical response was not what we wanted. It's disappointing.»
Spencer also mentioned something curious in the interview: internal mock reviews and just how different they were from the real deal this week. Every major developer and publisher does mock reviews to get both a sense of what to expect from a critical response, but also get an unbiased, outside look at the game they are building before launch. Spencer mentions in the interview that the internal mock reviews and the reviews that came out this week were very different.
«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,» Spencer added. «That's one of the disappointing things: we would never strive to launch a game we thought was going to review in
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