When Spencer entered the doors at Xbox’s headquarters in Redmond, WA he was putting out a lot of fires and he needed to change consumer perceptions about Microsoft’s Xbox One platform which didn’t debut well compared to the Playstation 4. He has done a lot for consumers since he started at Microsoft, but what he has done to internal Xbox team perceptions might prove to be his biggest coup. From the outside, at least, it looks like Spencer’s reign at Xbox has done wonders since the turbulent launch of the system.
Today President Barack Obama was in Poland to meet Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk. In 2011 Prime Minister Tusk gave President Obama a copy of Polish publisher CD Projekt Red’s popular game The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings to symbolize Poland’s position in the global economy. Even though the President has yet to play the game, every video game news site on the web has reported this story.
Let me explain the “news” again.
George Bush would have beaten the game twice by now. Obama needs more vacation.
I’m sorry to be trite. It must be hard to work for popular video game sites. I would kill to work at sites like IGN, Gamespot, or Polygon, but I am not sure how rewarding writing puff articles that merely mention “video games” would be for me. I am sure that I would love the opportunity to work at these companies, but I pride myself on writing well thought out articles that appeal to me and appeal to what audience may read my stuff.
Most of the articles also mentioned that CD Projekt Red will be having it’s annual Summer Conference later this week. The company will be releasing information about the third game in the Witcher series; The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This part of the article is informative. But, I would assume, most mainstream websites have already written that rote press release article also.
FCC vs. American citizens
I’m sure that I am a minority. I like to get my news, not just video game news, from different sources. I get news sent to my RSS reader, so, like today, when the same story pops up 10 different times I lose a little faith in the business prospects of these companies. I am sure that each website has their own niche group that only goes to that one website. I have a friend who only goes to IGN and regurgitates everything that he reads on that website. I am so happy there are people like Leigh Alexander and Patrick Klepek who can write the articles that interest them. I am glad there are websites like Gamasutra that can write articles with more depth.
I am thankful that I learned how to think critically at a young age because it taught me how to take a puff piece and write something different.
She's probably thinking about how many Bells she owes Tom Nook's shady ass!
She’s probably thinking about how many Bells she owes Tom Nook’s stingy ass!
Nintendo has been in the news a lot lately. Much of the internet would have us believe that they have been in the news for their lemming like dash towards the cliff of obscurity. Of course these kinds of headlines catch our attention and provide very “clickable” for the sites that publish many of these stories, but when one reads through the digital piles of garbage and starts to look at the real stories that are being written about Nintendo we see that Nintendo is a company that is daring to change the way that we think about video games. Yes! While continuing to make the same games over-and-over.
Xbox head Phil Spencer has spent a lot of time trying to silence Xbox’s detractors but with Xbox One’s third month on top of Sony in NPD console sales it looks like Spencer’s approach is panning out for Redmond.
