Phil Spencer Blames Capitalism For Bad Games

https://www.msn.com/en-my/money/savingandinvesting/phil-spencer-blames-capitalism-for-games-industry-woes-i-don-t-get-the-luxury-of-not-having-to-run-a-profitable-growing-business/ar-BB1kIG62

I laughed, at the people who caused the problem in the first place now pointing out why games are garbage.

Effectively he is saying that investors demand continual and unrelenting growth (aka if you made 50mill last year, you gotta make 60+ this year and 70+ next), and when they can no longer do that they will crash and burn when everyone pulls out and invests in some other pipe dream (ai).

All these companies sold out by going public, and now complain cause that act means they have to give continual growth to investors.

He isn't wrong, but yeah, by definition he is part of the problem and hasn't exactly been a force for change. It's like lamenting forest fires while flicking lit cigarettes into a bush my the side of the road.

There is nothing that the pursuit of profit hasn't or can't ruin.

This is the most basic tenet of existence. There is no more universal truth. Not even death and taxes. Some day someone may live forever but the pursuit of profit is 100% effective.

Big ticket returns create opportunity for smaller upstart companies to get creative and cut their own small space into markets. Some of the best games come from companies in their "sophomore year" while their earlier successes fund and fuel development but they haven't started playing it safe yet.

Quotes- "capitalism, by its nature, is an engine of destruction." (This speaks positively of capitalism, if you understand it.).

Quote2- "the rich crave control more then any other animal."
(Established studios prefer rules and control. It gives them excuses and stifles the creativity of those who would otherwise be able to compete.)

Exit quite- "logic is a beautiful wreath of flowers that smells...bad."
Mr, Spock

This is something people just don't get sometimes, publicly traded companies are regulated by the SEC. Their executives, yes those eviiilll people, have a fiduciary duty to return maximum stock value to the public owners. This causes all sorts of short sighted decisions because many institutional investors (401K/pension/benefits) like to operate in three year or less cycles.

Privately owned companies can do whatever they want, the owner(s) control the whole thing and do not need to deal with institutional investors or unreasonable demand for non-stop growth.

Stares in next-gen space exploration.

I'm always going to want SNES and PS1 era Square back but that's just never going to happen. FFXI still has the lights on and they are making another main series Mana game on actual consoles. If you're looking for more than that from a publicly traded company, you're probably having issues with reality on other levels as well.

He is not wrong, to be honest square needs to sell 5 mill copies now to make a profit lol

When they spend over 40% of a projects budget just on graphical assets, then spend that again on cool almost realistic marketing videos, it doesn't leave much left for anything else.

I sincerely doubt anyone even marginally informed on the subject is "looking for more from a publicly-traded company"...we know the seeds that were sown and know what the results are. The issue for most of us is you don't get to both start the fire and then complain about it. The accountability is nonexistent for what created these conditions in the first place, just a big ol "Mah Bad, y'all"...and not even a full "Mah Bad", they just cite the cause and fail to either mention, or be challenged to defend, their role(s) in those causes.

The only thing laughable here is how all those words being put into Phil Spencer's mouth lol.

This is the original interview, he tried explain current state of the industry(console market becoming stale), and how Xbox team will counter such situation moving forward so their business continue to grow in this stale market.(away from exclusivity, younger audience)

He said nothing about capitalism being the reason behind bad games.

https://www.polygon.com/24108700/phil-spencer-interview-2024-xbox-exclusives-layoffs

When PC gamer rephrased the same interview they added the word "capitalism" to the title for the clicks, even though it wasn't even what he said.

Then you rephrased pc gamer article by adding "bad games" into the title. ("Phil Spencer blames capitalism for bad games")

Poor Phil Spencer, he definitely didn't say anything close to "capitalism is the reason behind games being garbage" if you read the original script. It is all Radial's narrative LOL.

With a private game company like Larion, the person that buys the game is the customer and the most important person in the business. What you want is king, the customer is always right and if the customer wants hot frog girls to hump they get it

With a public company like Capcom or Square Enix you as the person buying the game are NOT the customer, you are a cog in the machine to make the actual customer happy. The person buying games from a public company is a cow in the field, the actual customer and most important is the investor. The investor is always right.



The CEO will be fired if they do not take actions that will increase the stock price or is too customer orientated as Saevel said, stock price is king. This means the CEO is forced to do things he knows the customer does not like, because the customer does not really matter. So they handle the customer to keep the investor happy, we are cattle.

This is why Square always says "did not meet expectations" when a game makes 500 million dollars or something, it does not matter how much money they made. All that matters is the investor happy or not, and if not then fail.

If a private company makes a big profit selling a new game, they can give employees pay rises, buy new equipment and fund new games.

If a public company makes a big profit but it's lower than last year or they get bad press (for instance if an important developer leaves or some scandal happens) then the company is in serious trouble because the stock price will fall, the investors will pull out or get real mad and the CEO will potentially get fired or have his *** slapped.

Then to improve the stock price they will lower budgets of future games (which usually means laying off tons of developers) or increase monetization or RRP or outsource cheap labor to indian sweat shops making assets that look like *** to boost profits to make the investor happy.

A public company is a race to the bottom, which is why we get companies pandering to the whims of investors and not customers.

For the person buying the games the company being public is awful, and cannot end well. A crash is 100% coming in this industry, even though saying this makes Afania mad.

The big problem these companies face is that population growth slowed generations ago everywhere (heavily in western nations), and has been in heavily decline since then. This means less dudes to buy their games and so less profits, so lower growth. This pushes the companies to try force girls to play their games too to increase the consumer base (even though most of them don't want to), and when this fails they demand politicians allow more and more mass immigration to increase the base of customers to buy their products and push down wages (not just games, this is all corporations pressuring politicians).

In a normal market place the investor would have no choice but just accept profits will fall with lowering birth rates, however when new industries rise up the investors can see they can get more money elsewhere. Open AI or Nvidia (linked to AI) for example.

The video game industry is losing its lustre for investors, and that's a good thing for gamers. Let it all crash and burn.


I know you're an investor and all but I linked to the article, which is where I got the title from. Also it is what he is saying, you're just doing what you normally do.

I don't currently own Microsoft nor square enix stocks, Stop pulling ***out of your ***.

You linked to the article AND add the word "bad games" to the original title, even though this was not what was being said by Phil Spencer.

I only correct your misinformation.

You can probably interpret his words as "he is not in a position to take risk/hire more people for games", but that does NOT have equal meaning as "capitalism is the reason behind bad games".

You just read his words wrong.


Is this..... racism? /=\???


Is this.... sexist? God forbid girls wanting to play games LOL.


Okay. I'll bookmark this post and let's come back 5 years later and see if video game industry still exist in 2029.

I am not "mad" at internet predictions, just that 99.999999% of time internet predictions are often wrong since such predictions are often made by feels, not data nor in depth research done by business experts. I thought I may as well point out that they have a high chance to be wrong before they are proven wrong lol.

It's 2024, I thought we were done doing this? Or are we still calling people 'ists' for trivial factual remarks? I mean, we all had a ton of fun with it, but I thought we had moved on from this.

IDK, saying Indians made "assets that look like ***" in "sweat shops" doesn't sound right? If you are an artist, how would you feel if you made some art in a company then someone on the internet use such word to describe your career and your work, only because you are from another country with lower gdp?

If you wish to move on from this then don't target specific groups in a statement?

It would be racist to say 'Indians can't make assets that don't look like ***and they all work in sweatshops'. I don't think what radial said is racist, he just needs to provide an example of a company that outsourced their graphics to an Indian sweat shop and got poor results to turn it into an objective statement. I don't think you're denying that those sweat shops exist, nor insisting they make high quality assets, are you?

Not quite sure it's sexist to say that game companies are aggressively aiming to get girls interested either, that's just good business. Any business model would suffer from intentionally neglecting half of their potential customers. It's worded very poorly though, so maybe.

Damn brother you're rustled as fk, you lost the argument so hard your panties are in orbit.

Let me be totally clear...

I'm sorry for being so aggressive in a forum, but, simply, you are lying.

He did not say that Indians produce bad work.
He did not say that women cannot enjoy video games.

He said sweat shops produce bad work, noting that many said sweat shops are found in india.
He said, generally, that women don't purchase games at the same rate that men do.

These are facts. If you see 'ism' in these statements I think you have some soul searching to do.

You've spewed nonsense all over the discussion and turned it into something else entirely by attempting to divert a conversation about the future of gaming into your own hang ups.

THAT is what we need to be done with in 2024. And I'm sick to death of not calling this out when I see it.

Even if RA can prove certain poor looking assets are made by Indians, they can't prove it was outsource studio's fault. Sometimes it can totally be client's fault that the results are ***. Such as client having bad communications, or if they change specs back and forth pushing the schedules behind, or if they provide source materials that flat out doesn't work etc.

But such problems can only be known to people worked on the project. For outsiders it is easy to blame the service providers for shitty assets.

RA didn't use the term "all" but it is still quite easy to read the sentence as they are blaming them for the poor result. Which isn't fair in my eyes.

Which statement that I made is "lying"? I think RA's statement about outsource studios sounds offensive to me. You are free to feel differently and explain why RA doesn't really mean that. But calling me "lying" over an opinion on choice of words?

What is the difference between calling people lying when they didn't and using "-ist" in a statement?


If I don't use "-ist", I have another word for this(to the "many" in your words). Generalization.



right, I react to negativity. If RA doesn't post negativity shits
about video games in literally every single thread it wouldn't annoy me as much.

Video games are supposed to be entertaining and fun, and HAPPY.when people feel angry over video games every once a while and spewed negativity everywhere about video games, attacked game dev and outsource artists because of the hatred, this made me wonder if they should quit playing video games as a whole so they don't get
angry over what they preceived as "bad games".

Surely it would make more sense to provide counterarguments or positivity than to attack his character using western silencing techniques, no?

He's negative, but it's not entirely without reason. It's pretty clear that capitalist business practices have resulted in a worse gaming ecosystem for pretty much everyone except the most braindead consumers.

Data says otherwise.

https://www.statista.com/forecasts/494867/distribution-of-gamers-by-gender-usa

48% of females are gamers, 52% are men. Only 4% difference which hardly justified such statement.

If they say "women prefer different kind of game from men" instead of "women don't want to play video games" it would have been WAY less controversial.

"Western silencing techniques" HAHAHAHAHAHA

Using the term "-ist" to describe a statement that sounds offensive(or at least, very controversial) to some is "Western silencing technique"? I guess people are more sensitive to "-ist" than I anticipated. Let's just see it as cultural misunderstanding and move on.

You are free to make a detailed statement about problems in current gaming ecosystem if you wish. As long as you state the root of the problem clearly and explained how such problems occurred, I wouldn't care if a point is reasonable. But that wasn't how a problem was discussed in most of RA's video game hating thread.

We call them "Body Shops" and while India is by far the biggest producers, Pakistan and several other nations do it too. They have national education systems that teach "computer programming" or other similar sounding courses as a formal degree. Many people attend those, graduate then immediately start working in those body shops to mass produce "IT work" the same way China produces goods.

It goes further, there is a special visa program for bringing in workers with skills that can't be found in the USA, it's call H1B. Back in the 90's business's got "computer programmer" added to the list and have been fighting tooth and nail to keep it on. It allows them to import cheap "IT Labor" from those India body shops and pay them a pretty low. This has been the driving factor that keeps entry level IT work in the crap situation it is.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazon-tops-list-companies-most-approved-h1b-visas-us-2023/

If a company doesn't want to deal with the H1B process, they instead just hire contractors from one of those "IT Consultant" companies mentioned.

https://www.myvisajobs.com/reports/h1b/

*Note* "Average Salary" is the Salary of that company not of the H1B's. It's "illegal" for a company to pay a H1B less the a regular employee for the "same work", the way they get around it is to use creative job position titles or so subcontract the position.

That data includes the Candy Crushers, the Angry Birders, etc etc.

I'm not saying those aren't games, but in the context of this discussion (AA/AAA gaming titles), those arent games.

Hence I said the less controversial statement would be "women prefer different kind of game from men".

The context of the discussion was publicly traded companies and investors ruined the gaming industry. Since they DO invest in casual mobile game markets, it is normal to assume such games are part of the discussion unless people are being more specific about it.

I think it's important to point out that "games" is a massive category. As a category female consumers have different preferences then male consumers, they buy different stuff for different reasons. Female consumers are less likely to buy big expensive triple A games with flashy graphics, they tend to towards games that require less rigorous time demands. Basically dudes are fine with sitting down and playing for four to six hours at a time while gals like to play for short periods then do other stuff.

This is why game companies have been trying to make games that are less time demanding by introducing "save anywhere" and check point systems. Which is a smart move from a business point of view, though it might put off the more hard core consumers. This is why we have market segments in the first place.

If you look into it, you'll see a parent company called Keyword Studios from Ireland. They setup and buy up sweatshop game development companies pretty much everywhere but mainly in the 3rd world, and pay these developers in those countries peanuts to make assets for AAA game companies.

Starfield used them a lot (the games credits is full of these works and companies), but lots of JP companies do it too and that's why you're seeing a lot of ugly *** secondary character models in video games now (everyone knows and has seen them, they are in every AAA game it seems lately from DD2, ff7r, starfield etc - Godfry posted some pics above). The AAA development companies have the in-house developers make the important characters and monsters, and they have these sweatshops making the secondary side NPC and stuff to save tons of money and that's why the difference is so stark. Square Enix recently said they are going to cut back on this, cause of the quality issues.

However, this is why the industry is laying off so many workers, cause they are outsourcing it to sweatshops.

As Phil said, when you can't grow the market you gotta cut costs to keep profits up so investors are happy.

Keyword studios even got in trouble for human trafficking and slavery issues at one point, aka developers don't crunch their staff anymore cause they get in trouble. They outsource the crunch and slave labor to a 3rd company, who then uses underling companies to do it for them.

https://keywordsstudios.com/content/uploads/2023/04/KWS-Prevention-of-Modern-Slavery-Statement-2022-v1.pdf

This is the issue with modern media.

Women and men mostly like different things because we have different drives and desires, but it's very expensive to tailor video games and movies for each so they try to water these massive budget products down so much to try to appeal to both. They end up appealing to neither.

There are things called girls movies and guy movies (same for video games, women mostly like mobile games and mmorpg type games to a lesser extent), and as much as these corporations try to make you not allowed to say this. It is still true.

This is why Star Wars and Marvel are garbage all of a sudden, cause they are trying to make them appeal to women too and think men are locked in. This does not work, or if it does you better be really good at what you do (and they aren't).

There are some forms of entertainment that can appeal to both, but most big buget success stories are very much not like this and built that success by either appealing to men or women.

Women very rarely will ever play fps violence simulators for instance, and women much prefer other kinds of games.