Xbox boss Phil Spencer has admitted to making some bad calls in his career but says he has no regrets about not making Destiny and Guitar Hero platform exclusives.
Speaking at the “Story Time with Phil Spencer” panel at PAX West over the weekend, the Xbox CEO of gaming touched on Bungie’s 2014 shooter and Microsoft‘s decision to not sign the game as an Xbox exclusive (via Eurogamer).
Spencer also admitted that, initially, Destiny didn’t click with him until the game’s first expansion, The House of Wolves, and that he didn’t think it was “going to work” before it was eventually published by Activision.
“There are so many mixed emotions and stories for me around Destiny,” Spencer reminisced.
“Do we want to sign this?’ We ended up not signing Destiny. It obviously went with Activision, and to seeing what it grew into, like from a business kind of Xbox standpoint, I can look at it [as] it’s just a really interesting journey in terms of what [Bungie] built.”
He added, “Obviously, Bungie was part of Microsoft when I started at Xbox, and I shared a floor with Alex Seropian [and] Jason Jones [Bungie’s co-founders] in the building that we were in Redmond. I learned a ton from just being around Bungie.”
“I’ve passed on some of the worst… like, made some of the worst game-choice decisions,” he said, before discussing the original pitch of Guitar Hero.
“An interesting one is when this team came down to Redmond and Alex Rigopulos, he pitches a game where they’re actually going to make plastic guitars, and they’re going to plug into consoles, and then they’re going to sell tracks where you’re going to play Simon on this guitar and I’m like, really? Do we really think that’s going to work?
“I hear that turned into a pretty good game,” he joked.
However, despite his decision to not sign two games that have since proved to be massive successes, Spencer explained that he doesn’t have any regrets and tries to “look forward and be positive about the things that we are doing.”
“I’m not a regrets-type person,” he said. “Maybe that’s a fault of mine, but I passed on so many games… I just like to celebrate what the team [at Bungie] has done. I mean, it’s incredible.”
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