Spencer Says Microsoft Is Set Up Very Well for 2024, Teases Many Upcoming Games Not Shown on Stage

Following the Xbox Games Showcase that aired last Sunday, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer was interviewed by Polygon. The lengthy conversation spanned several industry topics, as usual with the outspoken executive.

One thing is for certain, though: Spencer expressed a lot of confidence in the combined future lineup of Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda, starting with next year, which will see the launches of Towerborne, Avowed, Hellblade II, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and possibly something else. He also teased many games that weren’t at this year’s Xbox Games Showcase, such as the next projects from id Software and The Coalition, the Perfect Dark reboot, and Rare’s Everwild.

I actually don’t have a lot of fear about 2024. 2022 was hard for us. But I think waiting on certain games… Let’s take South of Midnight. Like you saw, the game got announced during the Xbox Games Showcase. We had that game ready to announce last year. But we said, let’s keep working on the game. Let’s keep working on the announcement. It’s OK to hold the announce. Or, let’s take Clockwork Revolution]. When I was here at E3 last year, I was at inXile playing that game. Not looking at the announcement video, but actually playing that game. And I come back this year down at inXile, playing it again with that team, going through the latest builds. So it gives me confidence because we’re staging the announce of the game closer to release. We’ve got hands on the game.

I think now we’re in a position to really pay that off. And not just for the next 12 months. When I look forward… there are so many things. We haven’t talked about what’s coming from id Software. We haven’t talked about what’s coming from The Coalition. When are we going to see Perfect Dark again? And when are we gonna see Everwild again? There are so many things that we still are working on that we haven’t shown. I mean, I don’t like to be confident, but I like to be humbly confident. I feel good about where that portfolio is. I think we’re set up very, very well.

Phil Spencer’s conviction in the lineup of first-party releases goes all the way back to E3 2018, when Microsoft began its acquisition spree with the purchase of Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, Playground Games, and the establishment of the new studio The Initiative. Later that year, Microsoft also acquired Obsidian and inXile, and the following year they did the same with Double Fine. Then they moved to even bigger targets with the $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax and the pending $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

With 20 game studios building content, the release calendar was bound to populate at some point. It took a while because some of the studios still had to release multiplatform games they were finishing, but it looks like the pieces are finally falling into place as Spencer and his team had ordained.

Of course, while the quantity is undoubtedly going to be there, whether Microsoft can match the outstanding first-party output of Sony and Nintendo remains to be seen. Bethesda’s Starfield, the next release due in less than three months, will be the first real test in that regard.