Xbox head Phil Spencer acknowledges poor ‘Redfall’ reception: “We let a lot of people down this week”

Xbox Game Studios CEO Phil Spencer has admitted he is “disappointed” with this week’s launch of first-person shooter Redfall, which has been received poorly by fans and critics.

Since launching on Tuesday (May 2), Redfall holds a “mostly negative” player review rating on Steam, while NME rated Redfall two stars in our own review.

Reviews aggregate Metacritic currently lists the game’s score as sitting between 58 per cent and 62 per cent depending on the platform, with players criticising poor AI, an empty open world, and performance issues.

Speaking to Kinda Funny Games (transcribed by VGC), Phil Spencer has admitted he is “upset” with the poor reception, and explained that this week’s reviews have been much lower than ones conducted internally.

“We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and this is double digits lower than where we thought we would be with this game,” shared Spencer. “That’s one of the disappointing things: we would never strive to launch a game that we thought was going to review in the low 60s — it’s not part of our goals.”

“But I also know that these games are $70 [£60], and I’m going to take full responsibility for launching a game that needs to be great,” he added. “We let a lot of people down this week with the launch of the game, but we will continue to strive on. You have to — that’s what creativity is about.”

Spencer went on to suggest that Microsoft’s 2021 acquisition of Bethesda affected Redfall, which was already being developed by the time it became a first-party Xbox title.

“We didn’t do a good job early on in engaging Arkane Austin to really help them understand what it meant to be part of Xbox and part of first-party, and use some of our internal resources to help them move along that journey even faster,” explained Spencer.

“We should’ve been there for Harvey [Smith] and the team earlier — I think that’s on us,” he continued. “Then through the process, it’s an Unreal [Engine] game: we have a bunch of studios that have done some really great work on Unreal over the years, and I think we were too late to help in that when they had certain issues.”

Looking ahead, Spencer confirmed that Bethesda and Arkane remain “absolutely” committed to supporting Redfall going forward, and he would “totally bet on [Arkane] to do another great game”.

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