Since both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 released in November of 2013, Microsoft's system has only outsold Sony's a handful of months. It feels like every month Sony is announcing a new major sales milestone for the PS4, while Microsoft largely remains mum on the sales of Xbox One.
Opening up about the sales competition during a panel at the 2015 GeekWire Summit, Xbox head Phil Spencer admitted he doesn't know if the Xbox One will be overtake the PS4 this generation
"You know, I don't know. You know, the length of the generation… They [Sony] have a huge lead and they have a good product," he told the audience. "I love the content, the games line-up that we have."
Spencer, who took over as Head of Xbox in April 2014, spent most of his initial months righting the wrongs of the Xbox One at launch. During the panel he was openly critical about how Microsoft had "fundamentally lost the trust of our most loyal customers" around the time of the Xbox One's launch.
"Whether it's always-on, used games, whatever the feature was, we lost the trust in them that they were at the center of our decision-making process," he said candidly. "Were we building a product for us, or were we building a product for the gamers? And as soon as that question came into people's minds and they looked at anything, whether it was the power of our box, our launch line-up, microtransactions, any of the features that you talked about, what you find is very quickly you lose the benefit of the doubt. You lose your customer's assumption that the reason you're building your product is to delight them and not just build a better and more maybe manipulative product."
"And that really set with me going through the launch and just watching the reaction, as you said, of the most loyal fans, people that had Xbox tattooed on their arm. And them coming to us almost in tears because they felt like the direction we were going with the product didn't include them."
Despite the Xbox One's slow start, there's no denying that with Spencer in charge, things have quickly improved. Spencer pointed out some of the "amazing progress" they've made, such as implementing backwards compatibility with the system, but acknowledged there's a perception issue with the brand right now.
"I feel really good about the position and the product and the brand right now, but I was at the Gamestop Manager's Meeting about three weeks ago and I'm sitting with 5,000 Gamestop managers in Las Vegas and they'd come up and they still have customers that walk in the store that think that the Xbox One won't play used games," he detailed. "Just to be clear, Xbox One has always played used games from day one. But that perception that gets set early on, because consumers have five seconds to internalize your brand and your message and then they move on. They're not going to spend time to read what we say afterwards. 'Oh Xbox One, that's that thing. If I want it I'll go buy it and if I don't I won't.' Regaining that trust and the mindshare with the customer, the gamer, is incredibly difficult."
To Microsoft and Phil Spencer's credit, the company has made great strides with the Xbox One since reversing its decisions on online requirements, mandatory Kinect, and restrictions on pre-owned games. With consistent updates, releasing almost on a monthly basis, I'd even argue the Xbox One is more feature-complete than the PlayStation 4 at this point. Right now in the lifecycle, the Xbox One is at least on par with the PS4 from both a feature and game lineup standpoint. The hard part for Microsoft now is swaying that perception, and convincing consumers that the Xbox One today is not the same one that launched in 2013. If anyone can do that, I'm convinced it's Phil Spencer.
If you've got some time, check out Phil Spencer's full interview from the 2015 GeekWire Summit below.
