Xbox boss Phil Spencer – Great relationship with Nintendo

Xbox boss Phil Spencer – Great relationship with Nintendo

Phil Spencer recently appeared on the IGN Unlocked podcast to talk about the company’s future plans with their powerful Xbox Series X.

Talk came round to the relationship with Nintendo and how flexible the Xbox team is about bringing some of its franchises to the Nintendo Switch.

A great relation

The relationship with Nintendo is great. Doug Bowser and I, we talk often. Furukawa-san, the CEO of Nintendo and I, know each other well and we have conversations.

I will say the individual IP by IP to different platforms, I can see it can get kind of confusing to customers over time. We’ve been learning. Some of these have been some of our development partners that have wanted to go do this, and we want to support the desires of our creative talent, so some of this has been partner led. But I think more and more about what a full Xbox experience means on different platforms.
Right now it seems like when any game comes out, it’s ‘Is this one going here? Is this one going there?’ And

I’d rather be able to set more of an Xbox-level expectation for our fans on where things are gonna go. I thought we did that with our first party when we talked about games shipping on Xbox and PC, and I got certain blow-back from certain people in certain groups on that, but at least we set an expectation on that, and I’d rather see us get to that point on the different pieces of hardware that we’re on. So I guess I’ll kind of leave it there.

I definitely have a ton of respect for the role Nintendo plays, and I love having great games on their platform. But I don’t really love this idea that for every one of our games, there becomes this little rumor on is it going to end up on the Switch or not, and I feel we should set a better expectation with our fans than that.

Who knew what the future might bring with such a good relation between the both companies.