This are not easy days for Xbox and Microsoft Gaming as the company not only had a setback on their quest to buy Activision Blizzard, but also that Xbox itself has not found it's key game to say that 2023 has been a seamless year so far.

In his appearance at Kinda Funny Games’ Xcast podcast, Microsoft Gaming CEO and Xbox leader Phil Spencer, while acknowledging that 20222 Xbox didn’t deliver, feels that  “very enthusiastic '' on what it is in store for Xbox Showcase 2023, announced just yesterday.

“No, we didn’t deliver.

There’s no ‘necessarily’. We didn’t deliver.

I’m not going to try to oversell Showcase here, because if I was on the other side watching this it’s like, ‘hey, after Redfall, I’m going to put my hands on the controller and that’s what it’s going to take to prove it to me.

But that’s not what Showcase is, so I’m very enthusiastic about Showcase. We’re going to announce some things that people haven’t seen, some new games, [and] we’re going to give updates to some of the things that were on your list.

The other thing that gets me really excited is when I look forward over the next quarters – which has always been my focus, how do we get a big game out every quarter, at quality – that things are lining up finally after some of the slowdown though Covid.

I’m tired of talking about that, but I can now see that we’ve got games coming every quarter that I think will surprise and delight our customers.

We still have to deliver on the creative, we still have to deliver on the technical, not every game we ship is for everybody, we know that. I’m not trying to build one game to rule them all.

We will have different creative takes, and we have a very diverse portfolio, when you think about the stuff that Microsoft Game Studios builds, but I like that.

I think for what we’re trying to do as Xbox, which isn’t to mimic any of the other platforms out there, [is to] create our own brand and identify the diversity of what we build, [which] hopefully will end up being a strength.

But we have to do it at quality, we have to do it on time, and we have to show people what they’re actually going to see. We have to show gameplay. And I think I’m kind of beyond that – we have to put great games in the hands of our players. There’s nothing else.”

I agree that more than ever, Xbox needs to begin more delivering than promising and of course avoid over promising to just ending under delivering.

Redfall formal Xbox apology

Of course, Arkane’s launch of Redfall after more than a year of delay and was not on par with expectation could not be avoided by Spencer.

For Redfall’s initial redemption he apologized.

“There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community.

I’ve been a part of it for a long time. I obviously work on Xbox, I’m head of the business, I have a lot of friends and get a lot of feedback, and just to kind of watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I’m disappointed, I’m upset with myself.

We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and this is double digits lower than where we thought we would be with this game through [those]. That’s one of the disappointing things: we would never strive to launch a game that we thought was going to review in the low 60s – it’s not part of our goals.

If you look at our review scores over the past year – and this is not a defense at all – I think the teams have done a much better job in upping the level of quality of the games that we’ve shipped… and this game was significantly below our internal metrics compared to where it was actually reviewed. But that’s not on anybody but us – we have to own that.”

Redfall is a first-person shooter video game developed by Arkane Austin and published by Bethesda Softworks and it was originally to be launched last year during summer after Bethesda asked more time in spring 2022 to actually in Summer confirming that the game would be bound for 2023 to make sure the game meets the requirements for launching.

Unfortunately this week has been bad news for initial reception and even before the game launch when it was revealed that the game graphics performance would be initially capped at 30fps, regardless of the user using either an Xbox Series S or X or PC.