The Xbox boss believes that it is the right decision to give the team that put much effort into the project additional time and let the devs do what they feel is right to do.
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently visited The Verge’s Decoder podcast where, among others, he shared that he is now open to making a commitment to Sony and regulators that Call of Duty will stay on PlayStation on a longer-term basis than initially discussed.
Apart from this, he also touched upon the delay of the Redfall and Starfield launches. When asked to talk through Bethesda's decision on the games' postponement, Spencer said that it's not entirely correct to call this a "decision", in his opinion.
The Xbox boss said that he believes, in the case of new large IPs, the question is rather whether the leaders are in a hurry with the release. Spencer admitted he's had such an experience when games were coming out too early and now he doesn't want to repeat that with Redfall or Starfield.
"It isn’t really a decision to move a game after spending the team’s effort over multiple years just to get to a point where you know you’re not going to deliver the game you want on the date that was promised," he said. "The decision to give the team the time to build the game that they feel they should be building is just the right thing to do."
The head of Xbox also emphasized that in the case of Starfield and Redfall, he was lucky to know the project leaders, Bethesda's Todd Howard and Arkane's Harvey Smith, well. Spencer said he often talks to game directors to discuss where their games are now and noted that he already has developed a sort of "gut instinct", so he can now understand development progress by how employees talk about projects.
"As somebody who has seen a few county fairs here, I might get some gut instinct about where we are, just by the way the teams are talking about their game and where we are in playing builds," Spencer said. "It’s an ongoing discussion about where we are. It’s not like one day, all of a sudden, somebody comes in and says, 'Okay, our date is going to have to move.' We track and understand the weighted risk on everything that is going on."
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