Hey XBOX One owners, you want to know 13 words that no businessman in his right mind would ever say?
“I’m going to take responsibility for those decisions, good ones and bad ones.”– A Businessman not in his right mind
Children! Avert your eyes! Cover your ears!
Insane, right? We can thank resident madman Phil Spencer for spouting such blasphemous sincerity. I mean, what does he think the games industry is, HONEST? RESPONSIBLE? MATURE?
Okay, before I tick off the site admins for the third time in the past two weeks, let me just say I have the utmost respect for Phil Spencer, who is taking responsibility for the fan backlash present just before the XBOX One’s launch. That is, the always online requirements, evil Kinect 2, and general vibe of incompetence that the gaming community at large received.
I do have to question Spencer’s sense of timing, though. Rather than outright say “my bad” at the time when the controversy took place, he not only waited about a year, but chose to make this comment at a time when fewer people trust the games industry than the Church of Scientology.
Regardless, a sincere apology (or as close as I’ve seen a PR statement come to one) is something we don’t see a lot of in the games industry. I think we can forgive the team at XBOX for this blunder, but I’m still sour about their letting the NSA into my private parts.
… Is what I would say if the rest of his comment wasn’t sleight-of-hand blame shifting. CUE THE POWERTALK!
“I know the people that make those decisions, [but] I don’t know the realities of the situations when they made those decisions. So it’s easy for me to sit back now and say ‘OK, we would have built a three teraflops box and sold it for 99 dollars’, but I don’t know.”
“I don’t know what trade-offs they were making, cause we didn’t make all the decisions as the leadership team. I was making content decisions. So I think it’s a little unfair for me to go back and kind of cherry-pick a certain decision like ‘hey what RAM do we pick’ or the ESRAM thing, or the HDMI in, or what we’ve done with Kinect, whatever it is, and just say ‘oh, I’m all-knowing at this point and knowing where we are now, I would have changed these decisions’.”
Unfair for who, Spencer? Your employees, your public image, or the people buying your console? Who do you guys think suffers the most from these “trade-offs”?
Stay Unaccountable, readers, and keep your eyes glued to gamerheadlines.com, your one-stop site for tech buzz, gaming news, and reviews for the releases that matter to YOU.