CEO of Morgan Industries
Superstar
If Phil wanted to make console sales not matter, he needed a better plan because Game Pass was always growth limited without being on at least Sony devices. A smarter person would have guessed that Xbox/PC audience wasn't big enough to reach the aggressive growth for GP subs that Phil was targeting. Honestly, being on Sony devices might not have been enough, either. Maybe if they were on Sony and Nintendo devices along with their own and PC (or if GP was priced significantly higher than it already was, or if AAA games were time-delayed to come to GP instead of day-and-date, etc.).
Phil also fukked up by going too big with his purchases. If he gets Satya to sign off on a Square-Enix purchase that's around the size of the Bethesda purchase instead of that huge ABK purchase, maybe the dollars aren't so big that the FTC doesn't get involved and the Microsoft CFO doesn't look so closely at the numbers that everyone above Phil decides that it's stupid to try to long-term force Sony to accept Game Pass by holding back IP that used to be third-party published and just go with the easy money of publishing everywhere immediately instead.
I think it was winb who told me that Spencer was obviously not as bad for Xbox as Mattrick a few weeks back, but I think it's obvious now that Phil misplayed his plan at every turn. The plan itself isn't bad, but he went about it in the dumbest way possible.
