Interview: Phil Spencer, Todd Howard & Pete Hines about Bethesda joining Xbox
Transcript
Larry Hryb:
Exciting news this week and I can't even believe I was able to do this, but look at this amazing line of guests I have here. Joining me is... I see y'all looking around. Joining me of course, is Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, Todd Howard in the lower right square from Bethesda Game Studios and Pete Hines in the lower left square. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me.
Phil Spencer:
Thanks for having me, Larry.
Todd Howard:
Thanks for having me.
Larry Hryb:
Now, I got to talk to you, Phil. You were quite busy yesterday with the announcement. Everybody was busy yesterday with the announcement, but tell us a little bit about the thought behind about what we announced yesterday.
Phil Spencer:
Yeah. Well, for a second, before I do that, you said I was busy. I think for Pete and Todd, they had the most important job yesterday. One of the things that's just a bummer right now is we're all obviously stuck where we are. It would have been a great time to be with some of the teams and to be able to have a discussion, but we couldn't do that. The most important thing through all of what we did yesterday, to me, was the voices on the teams at Bethesda and the studios, because really what this is about is the amazing capability of those teams and what they can do.
I know there's thousands of people at the company and they're going to look to their leaders and see how they carry the news, what kind of questions they have, how they're feeling. I wanted to just take a moment and say thanks to Todd and Pete for representing this with teams that they've worked on for an awful long time. I know teams that look to them and trust them and their support through all of this is like the most important thing in making the teams feel supported, so thanks for that.
Larry Hryb:
Great words. And Phil, I think this is the first time ... I mean, you and I have seen each other a little bit on some video calls, but it's the first time I've seen Pete and Todd and frankly, we've all seen each other in quite some time so this is kind of an epic moment. I'm really excited about it. Phil, I wonder if you could just go through and talk about we announced that Bethesda is joining Xbox and what that journey was like, if you would for us.
Phil Spencer:
Yeah. I mean, for me, it's kind of interesting because in the role that I have now, which is different than when I was just first party, I get the privilege of going and seeing partners like Bethesda, sitting down with Pete and Todd and the teams, and seeing the future roadmap, talking to them about what we're doing on platforms, getting Todd's feedback on our codenames, which is always critically important, kidding.
Todd Howard:
[inaudible 00:02:51].
Phil Spencer:
See, here we go. We can just wind him up. For us, there's this long standing relationship of what does it mean for them to build what they're trying to build on top of our platform that makes in many instances us feel like one team. Obviously, they have relationships with other platforms and they do similar work there, but the opportunity that came up over the summer as we started talking about this to me, just always felt right, because of that long-standing relationship that we've had. It's not that we've always agreed on everything, or we've always done everything together, but more like the why behind the things that we do and the push that Bethesda has always had to continue to innovate, continue to evolve, focus on their community, focus on their teams. I was just really proud that we finally got to a moment where we'll be doing that more directly with more insight into where both of us are going.
Larry Hryb:
I don't know, know if Todd or Pete, if you guys have anything to add there. Todd, go ahead.
Todd Howard:
Yeah, yesterday was a big day for our company, a lot of different emotions honestly, for a lot of the company and our teams are finding out the same time the world is finding out. There is a moment of, because we've been independent for 20, 30 years, whatever it's been, there's a little bit of shock in terms of we're not the same company or group that we were. And then you say, "Well, what are we a part of?" And you say, "Well, it's Xbox." And everyone even internally goes, "Of course." And then once they think about it, they get very, very excited when they understand the vision that we're doing this because we see the landscape of gaming out there. We've worked with the folks at Xbox and Microsoft for decades now and we see the same things and we feel really strongly that our partnerships going forward should be even deeper, and that the games that we have coming up are going to be better for it, so there's a ton of excitement.
Like Phil said, we've been through a lot together already, so it's kind of like we've worked together for so long and now to ... We've had the conversation with the past like, "Hey, what else could we do together? What would it mean?" And taking this step feels like an evolution. It's a big step, but also for us, a real natural fit for our company and our teams.
Larry Hryb:
You know, we talked ... Go ahead.
Pete Hines:
Larry, if I could just add to that.
Larry Hryb:
Yeah.
Pete Hines:
One of the things it's not just ... When you're in the industry as long ... I'm a month short of 21 years at Bethesda. Todd's been there for years longer than that. You get to know a lot of people and develop a lot of long lasting relationships. For us, it's not just what Microsoft and what the Xbox team can do, but it is the relationships that we have with those people and the amount of trust that we have. Going all the way back, the very first person that really had a big impact on all of us from Microsoft was a lady named Kelly Tofte who is our account manager back in the first days when quite honestly, we didn't know what the hell we were doing on the consoles.
We're like, "We don't know how any of this works. We've only done PC stuff." And the way Kelly worked with us and guided us through all of that and how to work with the Xbox team, and I mean the original Xbox team before it was even out, sort of laid that groundwork for the relationships we built and the trust that we've built. The more we got to know Phil, and really everybody on the team, it just felt right. It felt like the way we feel about each other at Bethesda, which is honestly the most important thing. For me, I know IP is important and technology is important, but at the end of the day, if you really trust the people that you work with, then there's no limit to what you can do. Honestly, I think that's why we're excited to work with Microsoft because there's a real sense of trust there and that we share similar values and ideas.
Larry Hryb:
You talked about the history you've had together. Can you share a little bit of that? And Todd, I don't know if you want to talk about some of the moments you've had along the way. And Pete, you certainly made reference to a couple of them there, but I mean, it's been quite a journey, hasn't it?
Todd Howard:
Yeah. I mean, there have been so many, and I think like all things, a combination like this where people read about, I'm always stunned actually because I seemed to take over the internet yesterday. And usually, I have my head down, just working and I always underestimate the kind of noise or impact these things make. It was pretty big. A lot of conjecture of how these things come about and at the end of the day, it's relationships, that the relationships we've had, that's ultimately what it's about. It's not like one piece of technology or one strategy. Those relationships from the original Xbox, how are we going to get this to even work and working with them, there's some great tricks that they taught us. My favorite one in Morrowind is you can actually ... If you're running low on memory, you can reboot the original Xbox and the user can't tell. You can throw a screen up though. When Morrowind loads sometimes, you get a very long load. That's us rebooting the Xbox.
Pete Hines:
It's called memory management.
Todd Howard:
A Hail Mary, someone there said, "Yeah. You could do this." I'm like, "Really?" I think there's a story for every game. When the 360, we were pretty deep in the 360 and there was an issue of how much memory it was going to have at the time. We kept pushing Xbox to double it. It's like, "Well, if you want Oblivion to look like this, we can do this. If you want it to look like this, we can do this." I still have this picture of our tech director after we got told that the memory was doubling. We threw a double memory party, and I've never seen a programmer happier in my life. He's like throwing a beer. He looks like he has won the lottery.
Pete Hines:
We had a cake with the amount of memory that you guys had switched to on the cake and all the ... Yeah, I swear. It was a huge moment.
Todd Howard:
That was a good party.
Pete Hines:
It was a good party.
Larry Hryb:
Double memory party. That's the first time I've heard that story. As you guys look back, and we certainly have quite a history together. Even I've worked with you guys a long time as well. I mean, I remember back in the day with Fallout 3. Pete, I know you remember these stories. I've got Fallout 4 behind me. I was filing bugs with you guys, remember? I was sending, "I don't think this should work."
Pete Hines:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Larry Hryb:
Todd, I don't know if you ever saw them, but I was deep into it and playing it. Having that type of history, and you're right, when the news came out yesterday and I remember I was sitting on a call with some of Phil's team. Phil, I think you were sleeping in, but we were like it's five of and it hasn't leaked yet. We made it. We were so excited. And then of course, like you said, Todd, the news dropped and it just like went, "Boom." It just went across the internet and lit up. And then Phil, you had your tweets, which were just extraordinary. And do you have any ... By the way, Phil, I meant to ask you, I know the internet would like to know, is there anything else in your office there that we should be looking for? Because it seems to be the thing to do, you've got to do lists and whatnot that people look for.
Phil Spencer:
I did turn my Series S into kind of a normal, see like its alignment.
Todd Howard:
You modded it?
Phil Spencer:
No, I had to make sure. I saw that people had us, our whole future roadmap, I guess, was supposed to be on wall over there.
Pete Hines:
Yeah, the grocery list was great. I didn't know. He shopped like that, but apparently he does. I think that's cool.
Phil Spencer:
I've said this before. It's actually my wife's office. I don't actually have an office, so anything that back there is her doing.
Larry Hryb:
I've always meant to comment. I've seen you on a lot of video lately and that piece of art on the corner of the desk, we got to talk about that one. I don't know what that is.
Phil Spencer:
[crosstalk 00:11:09].
Pete Hines:
Speaking of Fallout 3, Todd, you have to tell that was our first time on stage, right? Oblivion, we weren't on stage for that. Fallout 3 was the first time you were actually on the Microsoft stage. You have to tell that story. We've never told anybody that story before.
Todd Howard:
Yeah. I don't know, maybe we've done three or four press conferences now so it's not just the dev stuff with Microsoft. We've done a lot of partnerships, bundles, and marketing. The late nights, getting bugs fixed, finding kernel errors or whatever, but then the late nights at E3 are pretty ... The Fallout 3, I'll try to tell a story quick. They decided that I was going to open it. And so, it was the big press ... Was it 2008? Yeah, 2008, and Fallout 3 was going to open the press conference. You do a lot of practices. It was live demos then. Microsoft are pretty good. They have every base covered. What they do during a demo, it's live, you go out with a control. You're going to play through the demo, blah, blah, blah. In case something goes wrong, like it crashes. There's someone else playing also so they can call broken arrow in your headset and switch to the other live feed.
Of course, Pete was doing it. So Pete's backstage, he would play live with me. We ran through it a bunch of times. There's no problem. And if that one fails, they have a video backup, but that's in case everything breaks. But during the real press conference, you fill the stadium with however many it is, a thousand people, 2000 people, probably more, 3000. There were wireless controllers and I get up there, the press conferences start, you can watch it back. And MFer, the controller, you get the little, "Boop, can't connect." The little 360. Man, I just was like, "Oh please, no." And I remember saying, "I got it, I got it." And they yell broken arrow and they switched to Pete playing, which we had not actually practiced. But that down the line-
Pete Hines:
In all of the rehearsals I'm practicing, and what I have to do is basically keep up exactly with where Todd is so if they switch over, it's not like he's a half a mile away, right? And the entire time I'm rehearsing, I'm thinking this is the dumbest thing ever. They're never going to need this. Todd knows what he's doing. It's not going to crash. And I have Blake standing behind me yelling, "Broken arrow." And I went, "I'm now playing this. Boy, I better not hose this." I played the rest of it.
Todd Howard:
It was like two people went to a dance class but they hadn't really danced together yet. They were just like ... And so I'd be like, and up here it was the worst demo I've ever given, I think. But most people couldn't tell. Back in the team they were like, "We couldn't tell."
Larry Hryb:
That was a beautiful part about it.
Pete Hines:
He was trying to guide me where I was because if you wanted to look at something, I had to be listening and go, "Oh, he wants me to look at this." So I was trying to anticipate what he was going to say.
Todd Howard:
Now, I'm going to show you the Pip-Boy.
Pete Hines:
I wonder how long it'll take to come up. Here I am pressing the button.
Larry Hryb:
I'm sure for every time you've been at or near the stage, whether it's ours or yours or what have you, there's similar stories. Because you're right, with the live demos, you just never know. I know you guys have to run in a little bit, but Phil, I wanted to talk to about how you see Bethesda and their amazing games fitting into the strategy moving forward.
Phil Spencer:
One of the things that I've really been impressed with watching from the outside as a gamer is how Bethesda has challenged themselves to innovate at every step and learn from that. They were one of the early adopters of cloud with the work they did with Stadia, the work they've done with VR and Skyrim, the work they did on mobile with Fallout Shelter, and kind of learning from that. And the discussions I've had behind the scenes with the teams there and Todd and on, okay, we're going to go try this. What does this mean for us as creators? How does this change with how people engage with our games? Does this it new customers? Do our existing customers use ... All of those important conversations have just ... It's been clear watching that interaction between the canvas in which games are created and the creation of games on top, that that feedback from creators that are challenging themselves to do the next thing and learn always with the quality of the game at the center would be just such a great partnership for us.
I also have the benefit of knowing the future roadmap and having some insight into the things that have been both announced and unannounced that the teams are working on. I just think it's an incredibly exciting time for the work that Bethesda Studios are doing as they continue with the craft of creating games and also thinking about how our medium of gaming continues to evolve and their role in that. To me, that's why the partnership was just so natural because you find teams out there that are always pushing themselves and their own capability. I fundamentally believe that the more closely we work with teams like that, that the better we are as a platform.
Larry Hryb:
Which was a nice segue to my next question, since I'm controlling everything here. Starfield, what's up?
Todd Howard:
I think it's getting really good hype for a game no one's seen.
Larry Hryb:
Okay. All right. There we go. I asked the ...
Todd Howard:
People at Microsoft, some of the CEOs and stuff. I will say that it's a really exciting project that we've been doing for a long time. Once we got on the new systems, the things we found we could do and so it's a major engine rewrite on that game. People that know me, I like to wait as long as possible to show stuff so we're closer to showing it than we were in the beginning of this conversation. We'll see when, but I think it's going to be something really, really special. We're excited to work with Xbox on that.
Larry Hryb:
I appreciate that, and well answered. Pete and the rest of the gang, I know Phil and I have talked a lot on previous shows about Game Pass. I want to talk about how you guys, how excited you guys are about game pass and bringing your games. We know that some titles are already there and I know you're excited to bring more, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
Apparently we lost ... There we go. Okay. Sorry, go ahead.
Pete Hines:
Sorry. I muted because my dogs went nuts. They're big Phil fans. Game Pass has been a really big success for us in a couple of fronts. We've got live service games to use our own vernacular, like ESO and Fallout '76. It's given us a chance to bring those things as we keep making fixes and updates for folks to give it a try, where it's evolved a lot since it first came out, as well as bringing ... You know what? Phil, I think we got to have six or seven game pass titles on there right now and more coming. I'll be honest, it was after some meeting before all of this started that Phil was talking about Game Pass in a meeting we're in and I was like, "I should go look at what's on there."
I never pay attention and I started playing a lot ... I was like, "I didn't know this. I've never played this." I must've played five or six new things and my wife was like, "Where did you get all of these?" I was like, "Oh, I'm on Game Pass. I'm trying out My Friend Pedro, and I've started playing Game Pass stuff a lot more often and finding there's a lot of really good stuff that I just missed for whatever reason. And I think there's a lot of people who miss our stuff and bringing that to a wider audience.
One of the early mantras that I learned from Todd was we want as many people as possible to play our games. It's a lot of damn work, and a lot of your life that you put into making something, I want as many people to have a chance to experience something that I created as possible. And Game Pass is a great tool to do that for a lot of people. And so, having more of our back catalog, having all of our back catalog, as you said, it's sort of whatever Phil decides to do and when. But I think it's great. It's been great for us. We love to see people play our games a lot and I can't wait to see how it continues to grow.
Larry Hryb:
Todd, I don't know if you have anything to add there as a creator. I think you've pretty much summed it all up, right?
Todd Howard:
Well, you know what? That was one of the things that once we got, we saw the original vision for Game Pass, but then when we saw it, we saw two things. One, when our own games went in there, people's ability to try it and experience it and enjoy it, it's huge. And then as a player, the amount of games that come out and then you think, "Oh, maybe I'll pick that up." And then you realize, "I already own it. Well, I'll try it out." That removes this barrier of experiencing content. It also democratizes all types of content. There are games that get lost in, I don't know, green lights for how many copies it's going to sell, what's the price point? And at the end of the day, that limits what you want to do sometimes.
The fact that you have that system now that people are so excited about, it really opens up the creative opportunities where you can just focus on I'm going to make the best thing that people want to look at and not worry about some of those other things that I think can distract you from making something unique. And so, I think it broadens the whole canvas for games, not just what we do. We obviously have some big hitters, but across gaming, it's something that I personally have looked for for a long time, something like that. I just am overjoyed what it's doing, and I think the reaction to this announcement was also, "Wait, I get all the Bethesda games?" That's very powerful to all the players, so we love that.
Larry Hryb:
Great. Sounds like somebody's Outlook went off, probably Phil. You probably need to go somewhere. I don't know if you want ...
Phil Spencer:
Sorry.
Larry Hryb:
We can wrap it up now, if you need to go, Phil. I don't know if you have any final words that you want to share with the community and everyone at large here.
Phil Spencer:
I think I've seen a lot of the community's sentiment, from gamers, from Xbox fans. I'll just say, at a fundamental level, our goal with every move that we make in team Xbox is to enable you to play the games that you want to play with the people you want to play them with and where you want to play them. We see this opportunity in gaming. I kind of feel it at my core, nearly 3 billion people are playing. Now, obviously in the time when so many people are stuck at home, we see a real attraction to what gameplay can be about and the diverse stories and characters and worlds that creators build.
I just want people to know that these kinds of partnerships, these kinds of steps whether it's a technology move or a partnership move with a studio like Bethesda are all just about furthering our vision there of allowing more people to play, giving creators the best place to build the most amazing things that they can build, and find the largest audience that they can. I'm incredibly excited about this, and I'll also say I'm humbled by it because the teams at Bethesda have choice in what they do. The fact that they've made a bet on us as a team, to partner with us on the path forward is really great. I appreciate that and I take the responsibility of that to heart. I want this to just be an amazing partnership in the years to come.
Larry Hryb:
Well, I know everyone's excited about it. Todd and taught at Pete, I don't know if you guys have any final words before I let you go.
Todd Howard:
Not really. It's great. We're really excited. There's a lot to do. Looking forward to what's coming out. We really can't wait to show this stuff.
Larry Hryb:
Great. Pete, always good to see you. Great to see everybody here. So I want to thank you guys for taking the time and then I know Phil, they can follow you on Twitter, and Pete they can follow you, and Todd you're famously nowhere on social and I love that.
Todd Howard:
[inaudible 00:24:47]
Larry Hryb:
Anyway, all right gang, I'll let you guys go. Thanks again. Again, welcome to the family and we're looking forward to working more with you.
Pete Hines:
Thanks very much.
Phil Spencer:
Thanks everyone.