Starfield delay was ‘the right thing to do’ says Phil Spencer
The Microsoft Gaming CEO didn’t repeat the famous Miyamoto quote, but he came pretty close.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
IfStarfieldhad hit its original release date we’d be playing it right now. Bethesda’s space-is-the-place RPG was scheduled to release on November 11, exactly 11 years after Skyrim came out. While Arkane’s co-op vampire shooterRedfalldidn’t have a firm release date, it was also scheduled for a summer 2022 launch beforeBethesda announced both Starfield and Redfall were being delayed into 2023. How did Microsoft, which spent $7.5 billion acquiring Bethesda’s parent company Zenimax, feel about those two big upcoming games being delayed? According to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, pretty good actually.
Talking toThe Vergefor its Decoder podcast, Spencer said, “We have experience shipping games too early, but in hindsight when you look at a game like Starfield, which has taken so long and so much investment in new IP from the team, the decision to give the team the time to build the game that they feel they should be building is just the right thing to do.”
Spencer explained that, while the financial impact of those decisions was obviously taken into consideration, “Starfield and Redfall, which are our first big Xbox games with ZeniMax coming into the team, I just wanted to make sure those teams felt that they had the support they could get from Xbox. Maybe feel some of the benefit of being part of a larger organization that has other revenue streams and other things going on that could be helpful.”
The announcement of Starfield’s delay wasn’t a huge surprise. AsRich Stantonpointed out at the time, “The game is apparently an expansive and huge new IP that supposedly marks a huge technological leap, but six months away from release we hadn’t seen anything.” That said,Chris Livingstonwasn’t expecting the news and said he would have bet money on Starfield making its announced date, though admittedly, “Not a lot of money. Some money. Like, $28.” Spencer, who has been at Microsoft for 34 years now with credits going back to the fondly CD-ROM encyclopedia Encarta before he became the official Xbox guy, suggested he wasn’t shocked by the need for a delay.
“I, as somebody who has seen a few county fairs here, might get some gut instinct about where we are,” Spencer said, “just in the way the teams are talking about their game, where we are in playing builds. But you want teams to feel like they own their dates. It’s one of the things that, when teams feel like they own their own destiny with their games, they deliver better. So you wait for the real signal from the creative teams and production teams.”
Right now, Starfield and Redfall both have releases scheduled for the first half of 2023. Xbox studio head Matt Booty would very much like people to knowStarfield isn’t just a “reskin” of Skyrim, while Arkane’s Harvey Smith would like to assure people that his studio’s game actually does resemble a previous hit, making it plain thatRedfall does have Dishonored in its DNA.
Starfield factions: Find a cause to quest forStarfield cities: See the big spaces in spaceStarfield companions: Collect cosmic comradesStarfield traits: Give your hero some historyStarfield ship customization: Make your spaceship special
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames,Zed Games. He’s written forRock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue,GamesRadar,Zam,Glixel,Five Out of Ten Magazine, andPlayboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was about theaudio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he’s written aboutwhy Silent Hill belongs on PC,why Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, andhow weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
FF14 is finally fixing the fact my carefully-constructed portraits keep reverting to a goddamn driver’s licence photo whenever I change my goddamn gear
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s first patch adds some Mass Effect flair to your wardrobe
Today’s Wordle answer for Saturday, November 9
