Phil Spencer is an American business executive, who is currently CEO of Gaming at Microsoft.
Spencer is also currently the head of the Xbox brand and since being in charge, Phil has pushed for cross-platform play and pioneered backwards compatibility within the Xbox line of consoles.
Family[]
Phil Spencer has two daughters, both currently attending college. He lives with his wife in the Seattle area.
Career[]
Phil Spencer began his career at Microsoft as an intern in 1988, going on to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington.
Spencer has been a passionate gamer almost his entire life. He has spent parts of his career working as general manager of Microsoft Game Studios and working with studios such as Lionhead Studios and Rare up until 2008. In that same year, Spencer became general manager of Microsoft Studios and then moved up to become the studio's corporate vice president in only the next year.
In 2014 Jason Holtman, the previous been head of Xbox left the company. Phil Spencer went on to replace him and is still head of Xbox to this day.
Accomplishments[]
Phil has achieved a high number of things that have greatly benefited gamers all around the world. He has helped bring Backwards Compatibility to Xbox One consoles and has assured it will also be there on the upcoming Xbox Series X. Spencer also launched and announced both the Xbox One S and Xbox One X and has recently announced the Xbox Series X as the console nears its launch.
Other major things Spencer has done for the company is launch Xbox Game Pass. The game subscription service has greatly helped Xbox One sales and has been a major turning point for the company when the service originally launched in 2017.
Spencer is also a big pioneer of cross-platform game play. In 2014 when Microsoft acquired Minecraft developer, Mojang a new era of console gaming was started. Once the company was acquired, the developers began working on major updates for Minecraft, one of them being cross platform between mobile devices, Windows 10 computers, the Nintendo Switch and of course the Xbox One. The "Better Together Update" was released in 2017.
The update was a huge hit with fans of Minecraft allowing for unified gameplay. However the update was released for all curent gen platforms except the PlayStation 4. Fans began to wonder if Minecraft would still be supported on the PlayStation 4.
| “ | "One of the first calls we got after the Minecraft acquisition was from Sony saying, ‘Are you going to pull it off PlayStation?'," "And I'm like, ‘Why would I do that? People like playing it on PlayStation.'" | ” |
—Phil Spencer in an interview with GameSpot in 2019 | ||
In 2019 after a long wait, the update was released for PlayStation 4 consoles. Finally allowing players from all major console makers to play one of the biggest games in the world together.