Xbox's Phil Spencer Has No Regrets About Closing Mixer

After closing down live streaming service Mixer last month, Microsoft executive vice-president for Gaming Phil Spencer expressed disappointment with its closure but has no regrets about investing in it.

As the answer for Amazon’s Twitch and YouTube’s own streamers, Mixer was supposed to be Microsoft’s own entry into this arena after they acquired the company that began as Beam in 2016. Yet despite significant investment in acquiring high-profile streamers such as Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, Microsoft announced it would be closing the service last month and moving its efforts over to Facebook Gaming instead.

"It's obviously a disappointment when you try to grow something to the scale it needs to get to and you don't get there," Spencer told GamesIndustry.biz. "I don't have regrets. You make decisions with the best information you have at the time, you apply your best effort, and we're in a creative industry. We are in a hits-driven industry.”

“And if we get into this space that we get afraid of disappointment that we won't achieve what we're trying to achieve as an organization... I think it's fundamental to us that we're not afraid of trying things that might not work. And that is just the art of making video games, and frankly game platforms,” he said.

As part of Microsoft’s strategy for its games business, Mixer was part of the company’s effort to widen its community. The terms “Content, Community, and Cloud” were being bandied about to describe its vision for the future of gaming, and Mixer was part of that but it ultimately could not make a dent against YouTube and Twitch.

In the game streaming space, Google has launched its Stadia platform, and Amazon is reportedly set to announce its own service. Both have strong cloud infrastructure like Microsoft, but they lack the level of exclusive content that Xbox has. What they do have, however, are social platforms with a large community of gamers as seen via YouTube and Twitch.

"In terms of our strategy, I feel really good," Spencer said. "Our growth in content is a direct off-shoot of us looking at okay, we've got Azure as a cloud and we can build a cloud gaming platform with xCloud on top of that. Community, Xbox Live is almost 100 million monthly players, growing across all platforms, we're seeing people come in from iOS, Android, we're on Switch now, we're on PC, we're on obviously Xbox. We see that community continue to grow."

Clearly, Spencer is looking at xCloud as integral for Microsoft’s gaming future. “We need to be on all the places where people might want to go play. And our xCloud strategy allows us to do that, where any place, any device that people might be able to play an Xbox game, we want to be able to deliver that,” he told GamesIndustry.biz.

“That doesn't mean we need to own all of those social platforms, but we're having really strong conversations with many of them around where xCloud will be available. And to our content creators, that's just another avenue for them to finding new players, and to deliver great content to those players in a new context. That's one of the things that gets them the most excited,” Spencer said.