UPDATED 15:30 EDT / OCTOBER 09 2015

NEWS

Phil Spencer on botched Xbox One launch: “I think what we fundamentally lost was the trust of our most loyal customers”

While the Xbox One has a dedicated fan base today, the console was not so well received early in its life. Some features that were announced for Xbox One, such as not supporting used games or requiring an always-on internet connection, were scrapped before the console actually launched because they were universally unpopular with Xbox fans.

Recently at GeekWire Summit 2015, current Xbox head Phil Spencer recalled the negative reception Xbox One had before launch, and how it has shaped Microsoft’s approach to the system and its users since then.

“For me, I think what we fundamentally lost was the trust of our most loyal customers,” Spencer said in an onstage interview. “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. Were we building a product for us, or were we building a product for the gamers?”

He added, “As soon as that question came into people’s minds … 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 to build a better and maybe more manipulative product.”

Spencer said that he feels good about the current state of the Xbox One, but he admitted that the console is still having to work to regain users’ trust. He explained that during the recent GameStop managers meeting, several managers approached him saying that even today they have customers enter their store thinking that the Xbox One does not support used games.

“Regaining that trust and the mind-share with the customer, the gamer, is incredibly difficult,” Spencer said.

One of the biggest ways Xbox has sought to earn that trust back is through the recently announced backward compatibility feature coming to Xbox One, which will allow users to play their Xbox 360 games on Xbox One.

“More than the actual feature of backward compatibility, which I do think is important,” Spencer said, “was the sentiment that were were spending the time to recognize the value and the investment a customer had made in our product in the previous generation, and bringing that forward in maybe what could be perceived as no real obvious benefit to us.”

You can watch the full interview with Spencer below:

Photo by wuestenigel 

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