Xbox Boss Phil Spencer Passed on Destiny and Guitar Hero: 'I've Made Some of the Worst Game Choice Decisions'

ign.com:

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has admitted he's perhaps not the best judge of what games will be successful, saying he passed over the chance to publish both Destiny and Guitar Hero in the past.

Eurogamer spotted an interview with Spencer at video game convention PAX West in which he said he initially got the wrong impression of Destiny despite Microsoft having such close connections to its developer Bungle, creator of the flagship Xbox franchise Halo.

"I have to be honest, when Destiny 1 came out, and I might have played some of the preview builds that we were doing on Xbox, it didn't really click with me," Spencer said. "I'm not a big PvP player. You can see my player history; it's not a lot of what I do. And I was a little worried I was going to get thrown into a PvP world, and it turns out that's not what it was at all."

Destiny arrived in 2014 from publisher Activision (which ironically is now owned by Microsoft but no longer the publisher of Destiny) and became a huge hit, selling more than six million copies in a month and spawning multiple expansions.

Destiny 2 arrived in 2017 and is still being supported today (though not without complications), now under the PlayStation umbrella after Sony bought Bungie in 2022.

"The thing about Destiny that I start with is just my history with Bungie, and their evolution of working on games," Spencer continued. "I do love that it's a local team. I have a lot of friends over there still and yes they're owned by the other guy now but it's a game that I'll always love and a team that I'll always have a ton of affinity for."

When asked if it wasn't at all frustrating that he passed on Bungie, Spencer said it wasn't even the only time something of this scale had happened.

"I've got so many of those," he said. "I've passed on some of the... I've made some of the worst game choice decisions.

"An interesting one: When this team came down to Redmond, [former Harmonix CEO] Alex Rigopulos who's great, love Alex, and he pitches a game where they're