Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer would like to know if video games journalism is OK. He is concerned that the “whole space is gonna go away or be corrupted by things”. He mourns the heyday of magazines, and is bemused by this “SEO” malarkey he keeps hearing about. Much like a Dickensian child holding out a bowl for more gruel, he wants to know if there’s still a “path” for “people with a real honest voice”.
All that’s from an interview with XboxEra, in which they whimsically “flip the script” by having Big Spencer ask the interviewer a question. I’m quite glad I am not one of XboxEra’s interviewers, because if Phil Spencer had asked me this question I would have exhaled so dramatically I would have jet-propelled myself backwards through the wall and into near-Earth orbit.
“People who talk about video games, like the state of the game industry, press and community and all of that, it’s just in constant evolution,” Spencer began. “You see it, just like the industry itself. But I’m just curious, like from where you sit. Should we, as people who are someone who consumes content – I’m on YouTube, I’m reading stuff. How should we feel about the state of people like yourselves who get to talk about video games? Should we be worried that that whole space is gonna go away or become corrupted by things? Like people with a real honest voice? And just who want to kind of talk constructively about an industry they love? Is there a path for them?”
XboxEra writer Jon Clarke responded by talking about the damaging influence of “rage bait” reporting, which he thinks is the “biggest problem that the industry faces across the board”. XboxEra don’t go in for any of that nonsense, he added.
“Yeah, I love that,” quoth Almighty Phil. “No, I love it because it’s something that makes me long for magazine subscriptions, where you subscribe to a magazine and that’s kind of where you guys are, right? And it’s you’re paying on a regular basis for the quality of the dialogue.
“But otherwise it’s just too…. what do they call it? Search engine optimization or something like that?” he impishly continued. “And I have friends in the industry. I obviously do something different, but as somebody who’s looking for kind of balanced discussion, not all positive – we should be constructive and talk about things that aren’t working for us as players as well. Sorry to make it a heavy question but it is where my head’s at.”
Let’s imagine that, having been launched into near-Earth orbit by my own sighs of despair, I now explosively re-enter the room through the opposite wall, stripped naked by atmospheric winds and coated in a thick melange of mosquitoes and condor poo. There is time, as I somersault through the briefing chamber with dictaphone wildly extended, to scream some rapidfire observations of my own.
“PHIL! Phil. I too miss the days when people paid for video games journalism, regularly or irregularly. I too dislike writing headlines such as What Is Doom: The Dark Skyrim For Fortnite Fans Free Horses Fast. But Phil, this is the equivalent of the high school bully asking us why we are hitting ourselves. Your company makes billions from Search! Those “friends in the industry” you allude to have been trying to steal Google’s pie for decades and now, they’re devising software that turns searching for websites into a process of auto-regurgitating cliffnotes from those websites and cutting off whatever ad revenue we have!”
“Avoiding rage bait?” I would continue on my next orbit through the room, now gripping pieces of satellite fuselage and tarred absolutely purple by air friction. “Your company helped invent the concept of “console wars”, Phil! I know you prefer the Kumbaya rising-tide-lifts-all-ships rhetoric these days, but it wasn’t that long ago that Xbox execs were getting former PlayStation exclusives tattooed on their arms. Talk constructively about an industry we love? How are we supposed to do that when you keep laying people off?”
“Help us bring back the glory days, Phil!” I would shriek, as I disappeared for a third time over the horizon. “Refound Official Xbox Magazine and donate it to the Internet Archive! Go pour glue into Copilot’s personality core! Rehire Arkane Austin! Turn Halo Studios into a worker’s cooperative! Cede The Coalition to the CBC!” The interview would continue in this staggered fashion until the urgency of my gesticulating finally overpowered Earth’s gravity, and I disappeared forever into the last place not corrupted by capitalism.