Delaying ‘Starfield’ was “the right thing to do” says Phil Spencer

16 November, 2022

starfield

Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer has spoken about delaying Starfield and Redfall, saying he believes it was “the right thing to do”.

Earlier this year, Bethesda announced it would be delaying both Starfield and Redfall to give players “the best, most polished versions of them”. Starfield was due out November 2022 and Redfall was meant to be released Summer 2022. Both games are now due for release in the first half of 2023.

Speaking to The Verge, Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer said: “We have experience shipping games too early, but in hindsight when you look at a game like Starfield, which has taken so long and so much investment in new IP from the team, the decision to give the team the time to build the game that they feel they should be building is just the right thing to do.”

Microsoft acquired Bethesda and Arkane parent company ZeniMax Media in 2020 for £6.3billion in September 2020, with the deal being approved in March 2021.

“Starfield and Redfall, which are our first big Xbox games with ZeniMax coming into the team, I just wanted to make sure those teams felt that they had the support they could get from Xbox,” Spencer continued (via PC Gamer) before saying he hoped they would “maybe feel some of the benefit of being part of a larger organisation that has other revenue streams and other things going on that could be helpful.”

Earlier this year, developers at Arkane spoke about the sheer scale of Redfall’s open-world, with one of its farms bigger than Prey’s entire map while Starfield director Todd Howard has said that the city of New Atlantis is bigger than any city Bethesda has previously made.

In other news, Spencer has reiterated that the company’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is more focused on mobile rather than Call Of Duty.

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