During a trip to the United Kingdom, the head of Microsoft's Gaming division Phil Spencer found time to visit the Xbox On studio, Xbox UK's YouTube channel, to give an interview and talk about the topics that have recently orbited around the Xbox world. Let's see what he talked about.

Spencer first mentioned that the Xbox team is currently busy - and has been working on it since December - in the programming of the summer Showcase already announced when the news of Xbox's absence from E3 spread. And for the first time we mention the month of the Showcase: June, so close to the events of E3. Of course, this does not mean that Xbox will stop making announcements until June, and Spencer explained that there will be more announcements and surprises in the months that separate us from the Showcase.

Regarding his current presence in the UK, Spencer also said that he is going to the Ninja Theory studio to see for the first time the progress made with Senua's Saga: Hellblade II; that he is preparing to show it again at the Showcase in June, perhaps finally announcing the release date?

The manager also found a few words for Fable, explaining that at the time he worked on the first game, so it is something he cares about and on which he has a specific idea of how it should be; for this reason he tries to follow the development of the new game and says that the Playground team is making great progress.

The questions then moved on to the topic that has been on the table for more than a year, namely the acquisition of Activision Blizzard: Spencer said that he is looking forward to concluding the acquisition, proving to be rather optimistic about the success of the same. Speaking about the thorny topic of Call of Duty's exclusivity, the manager also said that Microsoft has never been interested in any form of exclusivity, and that once the acquisition is completed there will be no exclusivity of any kind for Xbox, not even in content as Sony does today with its marketing agreements: the company's goal is to make CoD even bigger and more important, and this is not achievable by removing it in whole or even in part from other platforms. Spencer once again made the comparison with the Minecraft franchise, which enjoys the same support on all platforms, explaining that for CoD it will be the same thing.

Phil then went on to reiterate a concept already expressed in the past, namely that the acquisition of Activision Blizzard is intended to help Xbox become a platform that can allow players to play wherever they want and video game creators to release their titles wherever they want; to do this, the mobile world is very important being the largest "platform" on the planet, and it is precisely to this market that Microsoft aims with the ongoing acquisition, given that Activision Blizzard is the largest mobile publisher outside of China. Recall that Bob Kotick's company owns important mobile titles such as CoD Mobile, Diablo Immortal, Heartstone but above all King titles such as Candy Crush.

The topic of discussion then passed to Bethesda: about the exclusivity of Starfield, Spencer explained that in this case he did not take anything away from the players of the other platforms because the game had never been "promised" to them, and on the other hand since the announcement of the acquisition he had explained that decisions on exclusivity would be made on a case-by-case basis. Some games make more sense that they are exclusive (after all, even the competition has its exclusive games), others instead - like The Elder Scrolls Online or Fallout 76 - need more platforms on which to thrive.

Spencer also spoke about the console topic, because some think that Microsoft's current policy is to abandon the console world to devote itself solely to cloud, PC and mobile. The manager explained that he really loves the console experience and bringing new hardware to life, and he wants this type of experience to remain available to players forever. He explained that hardware is also very important for Xbox, but creating good hardware does not automatically mean stealing content from other players, and this is the policy that Microsoft is trying to implement.

Spencer finally found time to comment on the recent generative AI technologies that are upsetting the world in all fields (ChatGPT, Bing, DALL-E and so on), explaining that in Xbox many teams are working on how to use these technologies not only within games but also as tools to create better games.