Giant Bomb on front page of Reddit with this GIF

Thought it was a cool that Giantbomb made it to the frontpage of Reddit with a great question.

too bad a bunch of the comments are people jumping on the anti-microsoft bandwagon despite Phil having a really good answer.

They still shipped The MCC in the state they did, and there really isn't any excuse for that. Not that he tried to excuse it mind. But still..

It's disappointing that more people are interested in Jeff "getting one over" on them than reading or listening to their response.

I don't think Jeff was trying to single out MCC. I did think that was kind of obvious.

Haven't heard the interview, but I would like to think Jeff asking more generally about broken games, not just MCC. They were the only culprits.

To be honest, it's actually kinda unfortunate. It was a an ill-concieved question and Jeff backtracked as soon as he realized what was implied with it. It's being taken out of context and isn't really what he meant to ask. It's the kinda thing that might make them reconsider coming back next year (although, they seem more relaxed these days).

You can bandwagon all you want behind it, but at the end of the day this isn't "Jeff taking it to the man", it's just a small mishap.

It was a funny moment and all but it was a great discussion. Phil handled it professionally. He thinks that early access is going to help demo and beta a lot of games in new ways on the xbox, in the same way that Steam is doing.

Is there actually a video of this?

I loved the portion of last night's stream that this is taken from, but this gif loses so much by picking this out of the context surrounding it and not including Phil Spencer's answer.

I hope it's encouraged people to watch the interview that wouldn't have otherwise, always good to see new bomb duders.

Phil Spencer seems like a really solid guy and handled it really well. He could have gotten all pissy or defensive, but took it in stride and admitted they should have done better on on MCC. I know people love to paint MS as a bunch of rigid, out-of-touch suits, but Spencer really appears to be a genuine guy who's in it for the right reasons. MS has certainly made some missteps with the Xbox One (MCC included), but IMO, Spencer deserves some real credit for being willing to acknowledge and learn from failures/mistakes/shortcomings, and the console is so much better for it. Good on him for being open and level-headed. It's paying dividends.

Why was it an ill conceived question? I think most people here would agree that an ever growing number of big budget games seem to be shipping in states that range from "kind of iffy" to "fucking broken". People have a right to expect that the products they are buying are going to work. And by work I don't mean a few weeks or months down the road when issues that should have been obvious before release finally get a patch. Games are definitely more complicated than ever, so of course bugs are more likely to pop up, but the QA needs to be ramped up as well to account for that.

@benny: Hopefully

I think he meant it may have come off more confrontational than he meant it.

I dont think it would cause phil to rethink coming back though. jeff is pretty respected

If you watch the stream, it's pretty clear that Jeff wasn't singling out Microsoft at all. And regardless, it is absoutely a fair and justified question. It's pretty simple really. If you don't want people asking you the question, then stop allowing it to happen. I applaud Jeff for actually saying what consumers are thinking. It is completely unacceptable to ship products that don't work. And speaking as an attorney, Sony, Microsoft and game developers everywhere are all quite lucky that the FTC hasn't come down harder on them for the shenanigans they've been pulling by selling broken products. Either it should work or you are opening yourself up to get sued for failing to disclose to consumers that it doesn't work. End of story.

I do think them ignoring phils response is sucky because it was good.

the reddit thread is giant circle jerk though. id avoid the comments

The issue with big games, and any developer will tell you it's always been this way, is agressive release schedules. They're simply not given enough time and resources to polish their games completely. In this regard, Phil Spencer isn't the guy who can really change that, but that's also not what Jeff was asking. The question was "Given that you guys are going in to the Early Access stuff, how are you going to handle it differently than Steam who have had a number of missteps regarding their pre-release market." He then followed up with, and this is all paraphrasing here: "even 'completed' games ship out the door with missing features and debilitating bugs, so where do you draw the line on 'unfinished."

That quote on the Reddit homepage IS taking things out of context, though I agree with excast that it was not ill-conceived and it made sense to bring it up given the discussion they were having.

@bradbrains: There are a couple posts in there pointing people to the full segment, but yeah, the majority is pretty bad.

I'd say GIant Bomb is on the front page when the full content is on there. Shit like this is probably way more self-serving than affording anyone a good talking point. And I agree that the question being fair doesn't negate the fact that Phil Spencer handled it well.

Besides, the gif is about Kudo's look back at Spencer. So good.

@excast: If you listen to the whole lead-up it's pretty clear Jeff wasn't quite sure how to phrase it, and he just ended up falling back on a much less nuanced question. What he was asking about (and eventually came around to pinning it down to) was how MS plan on making their early access program not fall into the same traps Steam has.

The question he ended up asking may or may not be relevant or important, but it was very clearly not the question he planned on asking (hence, ill-conceived).

This video reminded me of two things.

1.) Jeff is truly one of the best in the biz. He's the kind of guy who can ask anyone; from a developer to the head of the company, hard hitting questions like this, and then be making them crack up a minute later.

2.) Phil Spencer is a boss. Jeff's question could've made a lot of people shrivel back and deliver some standard PR spiel. But Spencer is real down to earth, recognizes that it's definitely something that needs to be addressed and answers honestly about it. That dude has really turned Microsoft around and I respect the hell out of him.

Yeah, least years was ripe with broken games. So I agree, Jeff asked a really good question to the right people and go a really weak answer

These console holders are supposed to be CERTIFYING games. So - fuck yes- Microsoft is on the hook for their own broken games and the third party ones too. And Sony is on teh same hook. Moreover, I'm not really satisfied with Phil Spencer's answer - he waffled. As Head of Microsoft's Xbox division he needs to answer for why games were so broken last year, and what he plans to do about it. Quality Assurance and Certification should mean something, right?

@ares42: How did he backtrack? I don't remember that :S

Jeff's question was fair Phil gave a real answer. There's no reason for any controversy from this.

Phil Spencer is awesome

Yeah the way this is being taken is unfortunate, though i also think jeff is leaning too hard into the "every game is broken now!" mindset as of late. I'm honestly starting to think some people just get off on being all spiteful and angry all the time and blowing things out of proportion, rather than calmly aconowledging the issues that are really there without being dicks about it.

I really love Jeff's question. Only wished it was aimed at slightly less loveable people than Phil and Kudo. Then I would've loved it more.

Edit: Love love love

As soon as I saw the gif, I knew exactly what subreddit this was posted to. r/gaming seemingly prides itself of taking shit out of context in order to perpetuate the anti-(insert publisher/developer here) circlejerk.

Meh, whatever. Jeff did a great job hosting and Phil was, once again, a great guest.

Spencer handled the question incredibly well, especially considering how poorly Jeff phrased it. He bumbled through multiple ideas before finally pitting the question I guess he wanted to ask in the first place, but didn't really tie it to the game preview program very well.

I got the impression Jeff was concerned about the GPP resulting in more games shipping broken, when in actual fact I think the purpose of it is to ensure that the final product has a better chance of actually being not broken. Obviously you'd expect games in GPP being in a less finished state, but that's acceptable because they won't be marketed as a finished product. Games are an incredibly complex beast and stuff slips through the cracks all the time now, I think GPP can actually be a tool in making games better for end users in the long run. The more people that actually touch and play a game the greater chance there is of picking out the bugs that the dev team missed because they weren't running the game in a real life environment.

I thought it was kind of obvious that he (Jeff) meant the current state of AAA games being released broken as a whole, not just the MCC. Phil answered the question brilliantly and I don't think it's going to lead to GB getting blacklisted or anything.

The gif is out of context. Just make sure to tell people that and link them to the full discussion. If they don't want to know about the full discussion, they're not worth talking to things about and are best ignored because all they want to do is sneer and jeer.

@geraltitude: As soon as Phil started talking about MCC Jeff interrupted him and made it clear that he was talking about what's happening on Steam.

Phil's answer was good, really the correct answer is gamers should stop buying broken games. However he can't say that since it would rub a lot of people the wrong way.

I don't understand why gamers get all butt hurt when the game they bought isn't 100% working as is should. The information is out there, the game is buggy yet people still buy it then complain like they aren't part of the problem. They need to be on the hook? they need to answer for this? Don't buy AC: Syndicate, Halo 5 or Driveclub 2 (probably won't be another one of these), that's how you put them on the hook and make sure it stops. Reviews are out there to provide this information, stop pre-ordering and stop buying games the second they come on sale. It's really that simple no complicated answers, it's not a conspiracy, just stop buying broken games.

Giant Bomb, your source for hard-hitting video game journalism.

@ares42: Yeah I remember that. That'd be clarification, not backtracking, to me. He was talking about MCC, but also every other partially/completely broken game. He wasn't singling out MS, that's what he wanted to clarify.

This seems like a very ordinary act of a video game journalist. They've said repeatedly that the games press know to usually not ask these kind of questions because PR and marketing people know not to answer them.

Also I really doubt Phil Spencer wants any games to be launch broken. And of the two games referred to, one was a multiplatform game. So this is being very quickly blown out of proportion as some heroic question. It's great that he did and I was interested in the answer to that question myself but let's not laud this as the second coming of games journalism.

Games will stop being broken when people stop preordering them for some useless character skin or other dumb stuff.

I wonder if Jeff perhaps has some regret about the question (in hindsight) simply due to some of the response it has generated. I might.

When I watched it as it unfolded, I thought "whoa, that was sort of a loaded question" but yeah, Kudo Tsunoda turning to Phil Spencer and seemingly telepathically communicating something along the lines of "why I oughtta sock this dude right in the mouth" was a priceless moment....and yeah, Phil Spencer handled it like a pro and it was all good. I just wish that was the end of it.

It's not that simple. With the MCC, virtually everyone gave it glowing reviews because in testing environments it wasn't clear how busted the MP was. Driveclub was kind of the same thing (except with worse reviews), but at least the campaigns in MCC always worked and contained enough content to still represent a good value for anyone who wasn't in it only for the multiplayer. Not that it was acceptable MCC shipped in the state it did. It wasn't. However, MS offered free ODST and a free month of live to anyone who bought it when it was busted, and now gives the whole thing away free with Xbox Ones, which I can guarantee was not the plan. They took a huge hit both financially and in reputation for it (deservedly) and offered several public mea culpas, with Spencer giving another one here. I'm not sure what more gamers should feel "owed" here.

Frankly, it's a bit petty to hold grudges. These guys are on the hook already. The Driveclub devs mostly lost their jobs. MS did a pretty decent job of making up for the MCC shortcomings, but at great cost in several respects. (I won't defend AC: Unity, because Ubisoft seems to mostly not give much of a fuck about anything other than spamming the shelves with sub-par, iterative releases, which is finally starting to bite them in the ass.) Refusing to buy a game from a publisher out of spite or some effort to "show them" because another game had issues is a bit ridiculous. For example, reports of the Halo 5 beta and everything since have almost all been pretty positive. After MCC, some skepticism is surely warranted, but if Halo 5 turns out to be as quality of a game as it appears on track to be, sitting there with arms folded saying "I still won't buy it because MCC MP was busted" is pretty damn childish. JMO.

Phil Spencer got some respect points from me. He had a very human, not robotic corporate response

I'm actually kind of shocked that people are upset at Jeffs question. I mean this is not just a video games fan site right? If you actually want to be a valid institution of criticism or journalism these kind of questions should be normal and asked often. Asking tough questions about issues that actually matter is the difference between a critic and a cheerleader. Your job is not to be nice to every one, your job is to be critical.

Jeff asked a good question and Phil Spencer tactfully defused/avoided it by changing the topic from game certification to the failed MCC project. Both where great at their respective jobs.

The comment section on that thread is a good reminder of why I want nothing to do with Reddit.

The out-of-context GIF is unfortunate, but as for the actual interview there's no controversy. Jeff fulfilled his role as a game journalist by asking a tough question that many gamers have been asking recently. And Phil Spencer gave a great, natural response and owned up to the failings of the MCC. An all around great moment on both ends.

@zombie2011: The problem is people are stopping buying games but it hurts all the games not just the broken ones. If you get a shitshow after you buy your new Assassins creed PS4 boundle you aint thinking "Well ubisoft and AC sure is bad lets buy something else". You think "this console was a bad descision".

So he marketed some of his new Xbox features instead of answearing the question, good to know.

But reddit is a great place to complain about reddit.

Spencer addressed the MCC, then went on to talk about preventative measures they're taking with the GPP like requiring demos and not allowing random yahoos to publish Lex Mortis-level bullshit on it, then wrapped a bow on it by bringing it back around to the Xbox One needing to be a place where both final products and GPP games should be quality. I wouldn't call that avoiding or changing the topic at all. I'd call it a damn good answer.

As for Jeff's question, I don't think people are upset about it, rather they don't agree with some of the reaction to it. It seems like the GB community simply recognizes that Jeff's question wasn't as much of him flipping the bird to MS by taking a dig at the MCC as the reddit people want to pretend it is. It was a fair (and good) question, and the discussion pertained to ensuring the quality of games in general. The MCC should have been mentioned in that discussion, as it was, but Jeff made sure to clarify that the MCC was far from the only example.

I do agree that both Jeff and Spencer were great at their jobs here. It's a question some folks who aren't Jeff may have been afraid to ask, and one some execs who aren't Phil Spencer would give a much worse answer to.

Like Kudo was going to answer a question about broken games when Phil Spencer, his boss and the head of Xbox, is sitting right there.

You realize your response just know is what most people are complaining about in this thread.

Instead of watching the interview your just basing accusations off of a GIF or in this case someones comment.

@rethla: He answered the question.