"We don't want 60-rated games," Xbox will give more support to its new studios after Redfall ratings

It is no secret that Xbox has had difficulties managing its studios and projects. Due to what happened with Redfall, Xbox boss Phil Spencer promised improvements in this regard because one of their goals is clearly not to have titles with a rating of 60 or less.

The executive acknowledged that they have not done the best job of assisting their newly acquired studios, such as Arkane. So he promised more support because he knows that the teams feel more pressure, and first-party titles like Redfall must deliver.

At the time of writing, Redfall for consoles has a 62 rating on Metacritic, while its PC version has an average score of 58. Spencer is clearly disappointed by the game's mistakes that led to its poor reception.

"That's one of the disappointing things: we would never try to ship a game that we thought was going to get 60 reviews. It's not part of our goals," the executive said.

He added that this bitter pill can teach them valuable lessons regarding the management of new studios and their projects. This is with the goal of raising the level of quality of future releases and thus having favorable reviews like those they received in 2022.

Spencer added that he trusts Arkane and its work and acknowledged that Xbox failed to approach the team to push the project forward as an Xbox Game Studios exclusive release. For this reason, from now on, they will be more vigilant about the developments of their new studios without obstructing their creative vision.

"When we acquire studios, there are games that are in development, and then there are things that are very early in development or haven't even been conceived yet. I think we need to do better at interacting with games that are in the middle of production when they become part of Xbox. I think there's a different expectation for a game and a team when you've been third-party and suddenly become first-party.

"And we didn't do a good job at the beginning of engaging with Arkane Austin to really help them understand what it meant to be part of Xbox and first-party, and using some of our internal resources to help them move along that journey even faster (...) We should have been there for [Redfall's creative co-director] Harvey [Smith] and the team earlier, I think it's up to us," Spencer said.