Speaking on the official Xbox Podcast, Phil Spencer touched on a variety of topics, including the Activision Blizzard acquisition, Guitar Hero, and revisiting older IPs.
Now that the dust has begun to settle regarding the 20-month saga of the Activision Blizzard acquisition, Microsoft has opened the speculation floodgates once more on the official Xbox podcast, where they brought Phil Spencer himself on the program to discuss a variety of things.
Among those things, he even clarified his stance on the now infamous Hexen shirt he wore during June’s Xbox Games Showcase. While the reasoning behind the Hexen shirt is as simple as “I tease about things like Hexen just because I remember playing it as a kid,” revisiting older IPs could be on the agenda for Microsoft in the future.
While Spencer does mention there are no current plans to revisit Hexen, he also says, “I do think when you look across all of the franchises that are part of our teams, there’s an opportunity for us to go back, even if it’s just to recognize the moment and what those things meant in gaming’s history, and do something right with it, make it available to people through Game Pass” regarding the ability Microsoft has to revisit older IPs.
He goes on to state that not only is there an opportunity to revisit older titles and bring them to Game Pass, but he would be fully supportive of studios that want to go in that direction, saying “because I think there’s just an amazing trove of things that we can go and touch again.”
Phil Spencer also believes that while Xbox hasn’t necessarily always done the best job possible when revisiting older franchises, he thinks “with Game Pass, we have the ability to maybe pick a couple of franchises every year and almost do a ‘revisited’” so it is very possible we can start seeing older titles, even Activision Blizzard’s older titles make their way to Xbox Game Pass in the near future.
While Xbox might still be a ways off from incorporating older IPs, namely Activision Blizzard’s older IPs, into the Microsoft software ecosystem, Spencer iterates that the goal will “not just create something for financial gain, or create something for a PR announcement and not deliver on the product.” He explains that Xbox has a responsibility to “be a great custodian for the content that we touch” and make a difference with the content released by the platform. The whole podcast can be watched just above.
