Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Phil Spencer: CEO, Microsoft Gaming

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Producing a blockbuster video game like Halo can be even more complex, creative, - and costly - than making a major motion picture. Kevin talks with Phil Spencer, a 34-year veteran of Microsoft, about video games as an art form, and how critical feedback is to game design. Phil shares some of his favorite games, describes the first program he ever wrote and even divulges his gamer tag! Kevin Scott  Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott  Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.  

. There was something magical about that feedback loop of actually seeing customers use the product that you had built that just, again, reinforce the whole loop about if you can spend more time in the creation on the things that really matter to your customers, you get so much more value out of that.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft. In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who've made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did. So join me to maybe learn a little bit about

the history of computing and get a few behind the scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around. the history of computing and get a few behind-the-scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around. Hello and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm your host, Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub. And I'm Kevin Scott. And I'm so excited.

We have such a great guest today. We have Phil Spencer, who is the CEO of Gaming at Microsoft. Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say, I had to wear the merch. I had to wear the band shirt to the band concert. For anybody who is watching our video feed of this, I am so excited to hear your conversation with Phil. Yeah, Phil is one of my favorite people and he has such a great job and has had such a great career. I mean, like, honestly, there aren't that many people

who have loved the thing that they are one of the industry leaders in ever since they were a kid. And like at every step of the way, he is taking this love of video games and just turn that into a super interesting career at every step of the way. Yeah, absolutely. And I can't wait, but let's go ahead and let's get into your conversation with Phil. Awesome. Phil Spencer is the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. He began his career at Microsoft as an intern in 1988. And since then, he's done many, many things to benefit the gaming community, like pushing for cross-platform play, pioneering backwards compatibility within the Xbox line of consoles and launching Game Pass.

As a heads up to you listeners, Phil and I know each other pretty well. We've been on Microsoft Senior Leadership Team together for several years, and you may have seen us gaming together recently for the Build Conference. That was a ton of fun. It's so great to have you on the show today, Phil.

It's good to be here, Kevin. Thanks for having me. So the way that we usually start these conversations is by going all the way back to childhood. And I'd love to understand how you got interested in technology, math, science, whatever it was that got you on this journey. Yeah, it's interesting. i think for me it probably centers on my parents uh who were kind of early investors in things i was interested in um i grew up i don't know if it's like a lot of kids but as a comic book reading dnd playing video game playing a kid My wife likes to say that I haven't changed much in the years. That's kind of still who I am. But I remember my family bringing home,

first it was a Pong machine back in the day, showing my age, and then Atari 2600, and really getting interested in video games in my home. The arcade down the street, my friends would ride, we'd ride our bikes down and play Robotron, Galaga, the games of the day and had a ton of fun. I remember when I got my 2600 at home, there literally was this question in my mind if I would ever leave the house again, or was this going to be the end of me? My dad, who was a chemical engineer by trade, so into tech. And as in his workplace, computers were playing more of a role. Brought a computer home, Sinclair ZX81. We brought it home. It was the first machine I ever had. in programs from the back of like Compute Magazine and buying books of code, basic programs that we would type in. I kind of learned to code debugging my typos or misprints in those magazines, took

some classes at school when I was in junior high on the Apple II. That was kind of the thing. And then I ended up in high school working in a video game store, Computer Mart in Vancouver, Washington, sitting behind the desk. And families would come in, whether they had a Commodore or an Atari or a PC, and wanting to buy video games or buy a system. And it was a cool opportunity for me to just kind of be along with different people who had come in on their journey, what was interesting to them. I was playing most of the games in the store, so I was a reference for what people wanted to play. That continued to when I joined

University of Washington as a student my freshman year in the engineering department. Then luckily enough, my second year, my sophomore year, a kid who lived two doors down from me, Tai Yi, his dad was a vice president at Microsoft in the CD-ROM group. And he saw some of the video game stuff I was doing on the Atari 20, Atari ST would have been, and said, you should come over. And to Microsoft, this was kind of pre-Windows 3. And we're doing some things on CD. We think pictures and animations and stuff will be

one of the new media types. They were just starting to create the multimedia division. That was my internship in 1988 in the CD-ROM group slash multimedia group, and it's been a crazy, what now, 34 years since. That's awesome. It may be an unusual path, but I don't think it's unusual for folks of your generation and mine. Because all of those things that you said, Dungeons and

Dragons, playing, comic book reading, video game loving, right here too. And like so many of us had that mix of things that led us into the computing industry. Just completely random, like when you got your 2600, what was your favorite set of games that you were playing? Well, so now you're going to get me in game geekdom. so I will apologize in advance. I think like a lot of people, when I first got the 2600, I was obviously attracted to the games I had played in the arcades. So you had Space Invaders, you had Missile Command, and then pretty quickly you realize that people who were actually building dedicated games for the 2600, taking advantage of the input devices that that machine had, as opposed to the multiple sticks and buttons of like a Defender or something at the arcades, that people who were crafting unique games were the ones that were really doing more interesting things.

And those are the ones I gravitated to, like your adventure-type games. And because people knew that, okay, I've got this joystick, one button, or one of the rotating with one button, and they built handcraft experience. So going in, of course, I was going to be interested in the things I was paying a quarter for down at the local arcade. In the end, what I really glommed onto was the creators who looked at this specific device and created some of the great games that are out there. And still, you think about Pitfall and some of these things back in the day that were just fantastic, fantastic games. Well, I guess the interesting thing about a game like pitfall for instance is

not only designed for the particular capabilities of the 2600 it's sort of different from a coin operated arcade game in the sense that it's designed for you to explore and like you you're not having to pump quarters into your uh into your machine at. Like you own the thing and you can play for as long as you want to. And like that was really a big different modality, I think, between the home console machines and the coin-op machines, right? You know, it's funny that we're talking about this now because I still bring this up with the teams. The fact that your business model around your video game is not an afterthought.

It's actually core to the design of the game, or I would even say an application that anybody is building. And not to bring it back to Xbox right now, because I'm sure we'll get there. But I think about diversity of business models on our platform is actually part of the creative tool set that our creators have. And I think you're spot on. And I use this analogy quite a bit, that in some ways, the coin arcades were the first free-to-play games, right? They weren't exactly free, but what they were trying to do is they built this compulsion loop around digesting quarters into these cabinets. And the core dynamic of the game, both its difficulty ramp and a bunch of things, was totally created around that business model,

and rightfully so. I mean, creators should get paid for the work that they're doing. And when all of a sudden you got home and you're spending 40, 50 bucks for a 2600 cartridge, you didn't want that same experience, right? And yeah, it's still part of the conversation today of what is free to play, what is a retail game, what is a subscription game. The fact that the business model is such a core part of the creation process is as true today as it was 30, 40 years ago. Yeah, and it was always fascinating to me as a kid to look at things that were beautifully crafted

things where they just didn't work because of the business model. So, for instance, like the ones that I'm thinking about are Space Ace and Dragon's Lair. Like, just the most gorgeous things. More like interactive stories and video games. And laser-dispaced. Yeah, more like interactive stories and video games.

Laser-dispased, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and they just didn't work for me because you had to stuff so many damn quarters into the machine to see the story unfold, whereas it could have been a much more enjoyable experience if it hadn't been tied to the notion that you had to pump quarters in at a frequent pace. It's so smart, and it's actually this intersection of, I would say, three things. It's the device that you need to go play that. Because the next question would be, well, why didn't those just become 2600 games? Or whatever it would have been at the time, Atari 800, whatever the right machine would have been, VIC-20, Commodore 64. Well, the problem was that we didn't have laser discs at home, right? And the visual fidelity

of those machines or the storage capacity of the cartridges or floppies that we were using, there's no way they were going to hold that amount of linear video content. So you had to have a big cabinet because you got a laser disc inside of this thing, which then challenges the business model because somebody's walking and they're not going to sit there for three hours in front of the machine. And you're absolutely right. How does device influence creative? And their creative was amazing for the time, these fully animated video games and the business model. I mean, it's still, it's as relevant, as I said, today, that same discussion, what device am I playing on? What technical capabilities does it have? What device,

what business models are prevalent? And then obviously the creative capability of the creators is at the core. So do you remember the first program that you wrote? So you were interested in video games. Yeah, there's some period of time between when you get your first console and when you go off to UW. So how much programming did you do between the two? It was constant. My first program that I ever wrote was probably Lemonade Stand in the seventh grade as part of

my before school computer club where you'd go in at 7 AM before the classes would open. I think it was an Apple II. The instructor was actually pretty good, would write up, here's what I want your program to do. Now it's all text-based, but it's least running math models. Then once I started working at Computer Mart, we'd actually have some of the game creators come

by the store because we were big enough in a local area around Portland, Oregon, that I would meet people that were actually working on games. So we'd get the opportunity to kind of help out with things like installers and little things. And that was kind of my production work for the longest time through high school. When I got to college, it was obviously all about writing compilers and, you know, kind of real CS code as opposed to the stuff that I was kind of doing. And frankly, getting a real training on what is a pointer and just real linear algebra math, doing 3D transformations for 3D games.

I mean, that was my real learning. But yeah, early on, it was kind of, here's a problem, go write something that works. And I love that iterative process. I miss it many days. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that I talk with people a lot about. Like there was this beautiful thing

about the simplicity of the machines that we had when we were growing up. I mean, they didn't seem simple to me at the time, but in retrospect, yeah, they were not that difficult to approach and start doing stuff on. Whereas the tools are way, way, way more powerful now and the machines are way more powerful. lot more stuff to get your head wrapped around if you want to claim that you have mastery over your whole computing toolkit. I was just talking about this with somebody the other day where when I learned, I started from the bottoms up, meaning I learned Assembler. And then through Assembler, I learned what linkers do and what compilers did.

So I was kind of working backwards from a high level language. And I remember when I started at Microsoft working with some amazing developers, Todd Laney, these other guys who would, when I would write code, we would literally look at the output of the compiler to see how well we thought the compiler did,

and then obviously watch the linker. And you were, as you said, it was all so transparent to you, the whole kind of pipeline to getting an XE. I would say one of my maybe overstretches when I joined Microsoft was, if you know anything about like Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIGS, these were all Motorola 68,000 machines. And when I got hired here, all of a sudden I'm on an Intel-based 8086 and I'm trying to learn a whole new instruction set. And it was kind of as most things were back in the day,

baptism by fire in terms of code reviews and how stuff worked at Microsoft. But you're absolutely right, the transparency of how things, not only were built but also ran at runtime, much different today. But frankly, the things that developers do today with writing code is well beyond what I think I would have ever gotten to. Yeah. Well, don't be so sure. But I mean, I think one of the really interesting

things technically about video games that was true then, and I think it's still true now, although you probably got a better beat on this than me, is that you were sort of forced into really understanding all of the low-level details of the machine because the things that you were trying to do were right there on the bleeding edge of what the machines were capable of. You were just trying to ring every unit of performance out of the machine. That's still true, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I would say one of the slight differences now with video games, well, let me say two things. One, most games that are built are targeting multiple platforms from mobile maybe all the way through a high-end gaming PC. So it requires a certain level of abstraction in how you're kind of building your game because you do expect that experience to flow. We were talking about Minecraft just a minute ago. Think about a game like that and

the different target platforms that they have. It requires more abstraction in the code than maybe back in the day where you're building one game to run in one place. The other thing in a video game today is, a video game can easily reach 50, 60, 100 gigabytes of data. The creation of the data is the most expensive part

in building a video game. And all of that is animation, music, art assets. So the code itself, yes, you want it to run as effectively as it can and efficiently as it can. But at the same time, it's not actually the critical path in getting a game done as effectively as you can. Toolchain and asset production is way more important. So we spend a lot of cycles actually on writing code to help us build a game as opposed to just running the game because the running of the game itself is critical. But when you think about getting that game done and making your creators on your team as effective as possible, there's a lot more internal work that goes into

building a video game than there has ever been before. Well, maybe let's talk about that for a minute because we've made reference to this teaser video that you and I made for Microsoft's big developer conference build. And one of the things that that teaser video is trying to do is show people that, hey, we've got this AI abstraction layer now that you can use to help you do things like make video games more interactive and enjoyable. But like this point that you made about how like the games themselves are so complex that

you have to build layers of tooling to help manage this complex task of making a modern video game. So, you know, maybe we can talk a little bit about that. So just for folks who know nothing about the gaming industry, let's take a top title, something like Halo, for instance. What does it take to make a game like that? Yeah, well, you're talking now when you think about all of the people involved in a creative process, whether it's the multiplayer, people playing with each other online, or the single player, which in a lot of ways are games that share asset but are separate games from a creative design construct, you might have a thousand people that are part of actually getting a game out the door. You're going to spend $100, $200 million, maybe even $300 million to get a game done of what we call your top AAA franchises of today from us or a third party. It's as big as any Hollywood blockbuster movie in terms of the production cost of getting the game done.

Maybe there's some ego in this statement as somebody who comes from the games industry, but I'll say the complexity is higher because you're kind of rewriting the film format while you're kind of creating the assets if you're doing engine work at the same time. So the runtime is usually being evolved, if not created from scratch, while you're creating these assets.

And this is why I think your point about the use of machine learning and AI, there's always this draw from some of, hey, we can have more believable AI characters. We can have kind of algorithmically created worlds that you can go. And how cool would that be? And us in the games industry kind of come back to, and if we could just help me test this game, that would be such a huge, huge breakthrough for us because it is as much about, when I say test,

kind of validating the content, validating the scripts, validating the edge cases of a game. These are the things as these games get so big that are really, really the kind of depth of where time is spent. And frankly, a lot of variability is spent in ensuring a game gets done. We kind of know what it means to create a character or a world, at least, or a scene. We'll do it a few times and now we've got a benchmark validating all of that content for the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of

players before they get it. That is the part that is just kind of not infinitely complex, but close to it, I think. Yeah. Well, and I think that's a super good point around technology in general. Like, you know, you and I love technology. You know, for the sake of technology, we can sort of look at a thing and say, wow, this is interesting and cool and complicated and nuanced. But at the end of the day, if the technology isn't in service of something that people want, it's pretty useful. And the thing that you want in a video game is just a super compelling experience.

It's got to have a good story. The characters have to be great. It has to be, you know, visually engaging. Like, the music has to be, I was thinking about this the other day at, you know, how big a difference it was, you know, between the, you know, the 8-bit generation of games and the 16-bit generation, just the sound. And like, and you had to up-level, you had to up-level the people who were contributing to the game because of the capability. Like the composition for a game like Mario Brothers, for instance.

Some of those are musically sophisticated compositions. That's right. Yeah, I mean, full symphonies now we're using all the time to record what we do in the video games. I'll say there's another layer that maybe players don't, if you don't dissect a video game, which you shouldn't do when you play. It should just be about the fun. There's also multiple layers of systems at work when you're playing a video game. We talk about video games and what is that kind of three seconds of fun like when I'm and that's the I have a controller keyboard and mouse or touch and what is the thing that I do over and over and over

that's kind of just so compelling and then I have another loop which is maybe my five minutes of fun of like what gets me to keep playing and keep playing and I feel challenged and I feel some growth in that and then maybe over a five hour, one hour period or whatever, there's another kind of set of systems at play to keep me usually having to do with economies of like, I'm gaining this amount of experience points. And what are the sinks of where I go spend at those? And does that economy hold over the time? We have economists that are working on games that kind of helped us with these things.

But the number of systems from a near-term control, and this isn't even talking about the creative of what is the story and do I feel connected to the challenge and the characters. But the amount of engagement systems that are involved in a game and testing those out, is the game actually fun? What does that word even mean? These are things that

game teams spend so much time on, and there's high variability in it. And I think there should be, right? At the core, while it's very technically based, I view video games as an art form. And what makes a good painting? What makes a good song? What makes a good TV show, I think there's a lot of organic in that. So I think the first video game for me that hit all of those things that had the three seconds, the five minute, the multi-hour was probably the original Legend of Zelda for the NES. And I just remember getting it and it was sort of instantaneously fun. And then you just couldn't put it down. My brother and I,

we got it for Christmas one year and we just disappeared. The entire Christmas vacation was gone. Do you remember which the first game like that was for you? You know, maybe because I came from reading and comics and stuff, the early Zork adventures to me were things I spent a ton of Infocom games, if people remember those.

And these are text, right? There's nothing on screen other than reading of the text. But this idea of an interactive adventure and kind of the extent to which I, in my head, perceived was there. In reality, when I played the game, like now, looking back at Zork, you kind of realize there's pathways that they send you down. And the amount of variability is there, but kind of not there to the extreme that was in my head. But those are the games that really got me going. And then a little bit maybe like your brother, and this is a total kind of 180, my dad and I would play Larry Bird versus Dr. J one-on-one basketball. And like, there is no story. It's Larry Bird and Dr. J. And I've got a one stick and one button controller,

like the old 2600 controller. But the visceral feeling I had when I would hold that button and Dr. J would fade away, and as long as I was holding that button, he wouldn't let go until right when I, you know, Larry Bird starts to drop and I let go of the button and the shot is made. And, you know, those connections where you feel such agency in the experience that it's like you're doing it, right? I'm not being led. This is something where my impact on the experience, and a little bit like your brothers, why I bring up my dad, I also see gaming as a very communal thing. My best experiences have always been played with other people.

Yeah, for sure. It's so much more fun. Even if you're not playing together, having a community of people where you can just sort of talk. I'm not a super big gamer now, but when I was in grad school working on my PhD, I lived with three other PhD students, and they were video gaming. This was sort of PlayStation 1 generation.

And they played an insane amount of Tomb Raider. Sure, yeah. And I was perfectly happy to sit there and watch them play Tomb Raider. Sure, yeah. And I was perfectly happy to sit there and watch them play Tomb Raider. Well, what a great franchise, because it's puzzle-solving. There is dexterity involved, but anytime you're playing a game

where kind of everybody can contribute in the room, I just think it's awesome. I'm playing way too much Elden Ring right now. Nice. A great game from Miyazaki-san, a good friend, and congrats to them on all the success that they've had. But game from Miyazaki-san, a good friend. And congrats to them on all the success that they've had. But it's interesting

how often I'm in a party and we're all playing. It has some co-op capability, but usually we're all playing in parallel and just kind of talking to each other about the experience that we're had or, hey, I'm stuck somewhere. Can you kind of come in

and jump in and help? And I've always loved that part of gaming, whether it's the old BBSs I used to run from Computer Mart and people talking about games or the experience in the store. And now so much of that has gone online. Just the community around the content and the creation is an integral part of what gaming is about. So, you know, maybe let's jump back to your time at University of Washington. So, you knew when you went to UW that you wanted to major in computer science, or that was still up in the air? Like most things in my academic career, I had very little, I had no plan.

I graduated from a place called Ridgefield, Washington, down in Southern Washington High School. I applied to one school, University of Washington. I don't know what I would have done if I didn't get in, but luckily I got in. My dad was an engineer, so he said, It's one of these schools where you kind of declare at the beginning and then after your sophomore years when you apply to get into a school or not. So I said, okay, engineering. My first, what was semester, I guess they were on semester system. I learned what it meant to drop a class and still get a sub 3.0 grade point average. So I was quickly indoctrinated into, okay, this engineering requires real work, not just like my high school

skate by. They had a class, I think it was called Engineering 101, where it was like a one-credit class. You'd go, I believe, once a week, and the different engineering disciplines would kind of come in and pitch what they were doing. And CS was not part of the engineering discipline, at least at UW. And I ended up in graduating, my actual degree is in something called Human-Centered Design and Engineering, the HCDE department at UW, which is this mix of kind of human condition and code and even hardware and the interaction between all of these things. When I was there, it was scientific and technical communication. It's changed names a couple of times. But I found that department through this engineering 101 class. And I just love the idea that we would be sitting there working on computers, building UI elements, writing code. section of the human condition and the capability of technology was just so interesting to me. And that's the department I joined. And four years later, I was done and got offered a software

development engineer job at Microsoft after my two-year internship. So, what was it like in those early days at Microsoft, either internship or full-time engineer. So, I obviously wasn't there in the early days. And my impression of what it was like has been through talking with folks like you who were actually there. And there was this famous Douglas Copeland book called Microsurfs that, yeah, talking to a bunch of Microsoft folks who were there at the time Copeland wrote the book, it sounds like it got some things right. So, yeah, I'm just sort of interested. I mean, it was a very different time and probably felt magical

because this was like when Microsoft was on its just really exponential rise, mostly because the personal computing ecosystem was on its exponential rise. Yeah, a little bit like my UW decision, University of Washington decision. So, Min Yi, who was the vice president in charge of Microsoft Press and the CD-ROM group, offered me this internship. And my choice was between going and joining or going back to Computer Mart for another summer, a job I loved. And his pitch to me or the internship pitch was at the end of summer, I get to keep my PC that I'm working on. And that's what flipped the bit for me and had me join Microsoft for that internship the first year. Because I was right across the bridge,

I worked full time for the first two years and I just kind of alternate my classes and where I was right across the bridge, I worked full-time for the first two years, and I'd just kind of alternate my classes and where I was. In terms of the environment here, you know, it was – I'm going to guess – I've looked at this before. I think it was about 3,500 employees when I started my internship, and what are we now, like 200,000 or some crazy number like that. I will say the similarities are mostly in name today, like comparing what it was like back then to what it is today. But I will say it's still an engineering-led, product-led company. Back then, the transparency,

everything, I had the full Windows code base on my machine. I was doing compiles of the full system. I was working on GDI and some other things with some of the team. The transparency inside the company, it was everybody, all hands, to get whatever we needed to get done. If you were a dev and you could write code,

most people were definitely willing to invite you into the code base. There's good and bad in that, as you can imagine, in terms of quality and practice and even supportability of the code that's written when so many different people are coming in. Hours were, we were doing 80, 90 hours a week, 100 hours a week. But I was learning. I had amazing peers and mentors around me to review. Not always the easiest when you're getting your code reviewed in those scenarios, but I excelled at a rate faster. I couldn't imagine any other environment with the concentration and peer feedback that I have. I was a little bit outside, and you could say I still am here in gaming at Microsoft. I was doing consumer CD-ROM and Carta, Windows Bookshelf, these kind of things, DOS Bookshelf. So I wasn't in kind of core DOS land or what was pre-Windows 3.0 or any of the precursors to Office. So we were a little bit of the ragtag group out on the sidelines, which meant some of the things that you read in like microserves and exposed to a lot of the core

Microsoft were a little bit different than my experience. But it was awesome just to see this company take feedback real time, look at opportunity real time and move. And we didn't get all the decisions right, clearly, but that eyes wide open, led from an engineering perspective, thinking about our products and our customers, it's something that still sticks with me today. What you just described is what I think folks are very lucky when they get to be a part of, like, particularly, you know, being in this intense environment where you're working with really smart people, you are, you know, like, trying to push some technical frontiers forward, and, like, you all, you know, hopefully you're sort of, you know, civil and compassionate or whatnot. But like, you're also just sort of moving at a at a rate where you just can't not give people feedback to help them get better about what it is they're doing.

That's right. And like the learning that you can get in an environment like that is unbelievable. I remember this one story, and it's somebody who I still work with. His name's Kevin Gamble, and he was at the University of Washington when I was there, and we were interns at the same time, and we both still work together. But 34 years later, how crazy is that? And he's in the gaming org. But we were on the CD-ROM, in the CD-ROM group, and there was a company called Amdeck that made PC-based CD-ROMs, and they wanted to bundle DOS Bookshelf with the CD-ROM when people purchased it, but they didn't have a device driver for the CD-ROM.

And we literally had two months to port all of the old DOS Bookshelf to kind of a new display engine that we had, write the device driver, which was going to have some impact on how our data was structured on the CD. And it was Kevin and I. And it was Kevin and I with some of the kind of platform people that would help. But as you said, kind of any opportunity to make us more efficient between each other and not just in hours or lack of food, but actual the work that we're doing from a debugging standpoint, from a data prep standpoint, from a build timing standpoint, like we were doing the math. Because if we could cut an hour out of our build time, like what would that mean in this hyper concentrated, you've got two months to go get this thing done for, you know, some business

deal at the end of it. And those experiences were just so eye opening. And then when you finally get it done, and you know, it's out in the market, I don't know, probably 10,000 people use the thing in the end. But there was something magical about that feedback loop of actually seeing customers use the product that you had built that just, again, reinforce the whole loop about, if you can spend more time in the creation on the things that really matter to your customers,

you get so much more value out of that. Just looking at your production pipeline through that lens, I just found was really helpful for us. Well, which brings me to this thing about you and what you have chosen to do, which is you get to make things that you put in people's hands and the objective of them using it is their enjoyment. And so, you know, you can tell whether you've done a good job or not. Like people either enjoy the thing that you've made or they don't. They either play it a lot

or they don't. They either, you know, like talk about it positively or they don't. And that is different than sometimes people who do infrastructure things. Like, I've been a systems person most of my career. And you have to figure out other ways to determine whether or not the things you're working on are creating value or serving a good purpose. How important is that to you as an engineer, like having that feedback loop? For me, personally and professionally, is really my only way of operating is both from a personal fulfillment. I'm not at all a judge of any engineering out there. It's. And I'm not, it's not at all a judge

of any kind of engineering out there. It's just kind of how I'm wired. You know this because you and I have been online before. You know, I'm P3 on Xbox Live. When I'm playing online, people see my gamer tag. I don't hide it. My Twitter handle is out there. Like you said, the feedback on the work that we do,

good and bad, is out there front and center. And while there's obviously good days and bad days for myself and the teams and the products that we're building, for me, that complete loop of we have an idea, whether it's iterative on something that we've already done or completely new, we're going to work that over multiple years in the case of these big games that we were talking about to deliver something.

And that end result in the feedback that you get is the thing that gives me momentum into the next thing. But that's, like I said, that's kind of how I'm wired. I like the completeness of that. I mean, I'm enthralled by, I think of like, you think three, 400 years ago, there's like architects in Europe working on these massive churches that are going to take 200 years to build. And they're in the middle of this. And if you're like a Mason, you know that you didn't see the beginning and your life

will not exist. You won't live long enough to see the end and these people throw themselves into these builds and we have similar kind of projects at microsoft as you know that take like multiple multiple decades um especially some of these things where they're way out there horizon three things and i am just so impressed by people that have that amount of intellectual drive to see through it. For me, that tighter feedback loop is just part of how I'm wired. And I'm glad we have those people that can think longer term about infrastructure and longer term investments. It's not just longer term, but it's at a different level in the stack, the things that we do.

And the conversations, one of the reasons I always love having conversations with you, because the conversations of how different people think about these problems and opportunities are just awesome feedback into what we do. Yeah. That said, you are managing a bunch of things that take multiple years to go do. There's both infrastructure things like xCloud,

for instance, and there's also these games which are like a AAA game is thousand people worth of complexity working over multiple years. So how do you manage that? It might be obvious to someone just getting into the field, like how you go do your two-month project where you're porting this books project for a new CD-ROM format. But 1,000 people for three years to get to the thing where you start getting the feedback? How does that work?

Yeah. It's been real learning for me, just being transparent on this. The biggest one of these things is I moved into this job ahead of Xbox, which is now eight years ago, which is crazy to think about, is hardware. The hardware timelines as a software, as somebody who grew up in software, not only is it the timeline on hardware,

but when you find a bug, the loop to go back and fix a problem until you get your next EV build of hardware, and as you said, longer-term platform things that we're obviously doing on Xbox has been a real learning. I grew up at Microsoft. Prior to the head of Xbox, I was head of our studios organization, so building games.

I think for me, when you have the portfolio of things going on, you just daisy-chain people like your games in your head of, okay, every year we're going to have three or four or five releases, and I'll get my endorphin hit from those things, knowing that the things that will come the following year probably have been in development for three or four years. That portfolio of just, that portfolio of things, different stages were very useful. When I came into this job and took on the hardware requirement, the platform work, having some ideas like Game Pass and xCloud,

which we, xCloud being our cloud streaming, Game Pass being our gaming subscription, that we had to invest in over time. It was learning for me, both as a leader and as a member of the team on how to just structure my thinking differently, finding people on the team that had that capability beyond what I did listening and learning. And it's just been part of my growth in this role over the years. The thing that I never really appreciated until I was working on my PhD is the role that stamina plays in trying to do something complicated, where you have to have some framework for how you're going to break a big problem down into a bunch of manageable chunks, and then you've got to have the stamina to just go do all of the chunks

until you're finished. And like, I know, I mean, you basically are working on 100 PhDs at once, given the complexity of all of the things that are in the pipeline. And it must be an interesting thing helping all of those teams, like maintain that focus

and having the stamina to get everything done. Yeah. I think your point about decomposing the problem a bit and making it digestible and more meaningful chunks of time than five, six, seven years is really, really useful. The other thing I'd say, and this is different, we're an anomaly inside of Microsoft and maybe even gaming and tech, though I think VCs, this probably resonates a little more, is we are a kind of portfolio business. We're going to ship 10 things. All of them might have been kind of

these very expensive, very long endeavors that we've talked about. And you might have two or three of them that you would earmark as success at the end of that. That's just kind of entertainment, right? Whether you're writing a book, making a movie, making an album, your hit rate, 20, 30, maybe 40%, if you're kind of crazy good, is what the hit rate is for most at-scale publishers.

And yet you're sitting inside of Microsoft with kind of tried and true franchises like Windows and Office and now growing in Azure. There is a little bit of an impedance mismatch when you're walking in and you're showing this portfolio of things, and you might get the obvious question of, okay, which ones of these are going to work? You can't rank it by budget, you can't rank it by time or by what's hot today.

That's, I'd say, another change or another difference. You've got this longevity kind of opportunities you talk about and how you break down the problem. And then at the end of these things, making every team feel like they succeeded, knowing that most of your teams are likely going to be in a situation where they didn't hit their own goals and expectations. And that stamina that you talk about has to not only live inside of the existing project, but you hope that coming out of another project, regardless of the outcome, there's a slingshot into more stamina for the next

thing that you want a team to go do. And so, related to that, like, how do you get people to continue to take creative risk when the risks that they may have taken last time didn't pay off the way that they wanted it to? Yeah. I mean, one thing is the industry will do it, right? We're in an industry, just like technology for Microsoft, that you're either kind of moving forward or you're moving backward relative to the expectations of our customers. We have very few customers, even taking the original Zelda game that you loved, still a great game today. But if it launched in the sea of games that are out there today, and you and your brother went and picked that up, it's going to have a different equation to that game becoming as successful. You'll still have your Minecrafts and things of the day that aren't about how many

pixels can we go push per, uh, per second on screen. But, um, when you're, so the industry will set the bar for the teams and our teams are very, very, uh, consumptive in terms of what our art form is about and where the bar is. But it is true that after something launches, you want to sit back and be transparent with the teams, both about what went well and what did not in terms of our own process, and then what we learn so that you have more momentum in the next thing. One thing I've learned in my role is for me to be very transparent about my own journey and the areas where I succeed and the areas that I fail.

And every day, every day I make some decisions that are good or do some things that are – and every day I make some mistakes. And Satya likes to talk about growth mindset, which I think is an important kind of framework here. It's not about doing the perfect thing every single time, every single day. It's about on this journey of growth and reflection and learning. And so for myself, when I'm working with the teams, I try to be transparent about my own learnings and my leadership team. I think they reflect that as well. But that's a cultural thing that you have to start very, very long. Because people in the end, what you're really looking for is teams that feel safe. But that's a cultural thing that you have to start very, very long because people in the end,

what you're really looking for is teams that feel safe. They feel safe taking the risk. There's so many facets to what makes a team feel safe in today's world. Yeah. I had two different bosses a long time ago that had two pieces of feedback for me that were pretty pivotal. One was if you're not failing sometimes, you're probably not trying hard enough. That's right.

And then I had another boss where God knows I have made many, many mistakes. And so in the ad systems that I've run many, many mistakes. And so, you know, like in the ad systems that I run in the past, you know, a system outage could mean millions of dollars of revenue an hour that you're losing. And every time one of those things would happen, I had this boss who would say, well, you know, be very calm in the moment, like get the problem fixed. And then make sure that you're getting your K million dollars worth of learning out of this episode, because each one of them teaches you something. That's exactly right. I think it's very good learning. A friend of mine runs a company called Supercell. It does a game called Clash Royale, Clash of Clans back in the day. And when teams would set goals and ship, and if they had great success, he would take them all down to the local pub and they'd all have a beer. When teams didn't

reach their goals, he'd take them down and they'd all have champagne, trying to create this idea that setting that bar high and hitting the goals or exceeding the goals is always a special moment. But the outcome is actually in many ways decoupled from the effort. We put our best and best people and most effort into some of the things that didn't work. And to try not to create

a direct causality between here, like all of the serendipity that goes in to making something a hit. Why is Minecraft a hit, right? Why when Marcus puts up Minecraft as this Java XE on a server or, you know, you can look at something like a Roblox or a Fortnite.

I mean, trying to excelize the success of kind of human entertainment is so, so difficult. And, yeah, I think those are words of wisdom that your boss is giving you. Well, so, you know, let's talk a little bit more about your career. So, you've been at Microsoft for 34 years, and obviously it's worked out really well for you. Do you have any advice for folks about how to grow professionally when they are sticking with a company for

a long time or maybe even if they're not? You must have had some sort of theory of career given where you've gotten, right? The things I can look back on and say, what are those critical moments or decisions that have led me to what I think is just an amazing opportunity I have here, leading the gaming org with an amazing team. One is just the power of human connections.

Also being conscious makes me reflect on something sideways to that or related is the power of human connections and also being conscious makes me reflect on something sideways to that, or related is the power of privilege in some of those connections and how others might not have them and how I want to lead and ensure that I'm opening up as many connections for as many people as possible. But when I look back on forks in the road for me at my Microsoft career and what kept me here, what kept me motivated, it was usually around my connection to people who I wasn't working

with directly at the time and somebody just reaching out and saying, hey, you should give this a try. You should look at this. Here's an interesting opportunity. And it's really stuck with me that through my career, I love to make those connections with people, to listen to their journey, to keep those connections as warm as I can. have been about knowing somebody and the connection and that being kind of a first step in a multi-step journey to kind of taking the career step. And the other two things I'll say quickly, almost every job I've taken, I think I can say every job, including that original internship, I was not prepared for. And I've just kind of learned that even when this head of Xbox job came open through a process of attrition, everybody else kind of left and I was here. The imposter syndrome that I have walking out on an E3 stage or leading teams talking about hardware,

something I didn't at the time know much about. But kind of preparing yourself for those moments that the serendipity of luck meets, as I said, some kind of the privilege that's there at the time. I just encourage people to bet on themselves when they're ready and when those opportunities come jump. And like I said, every decision I've ever made on my career, I felt like a year or two earlier than I should have done it. And in hindsight, some of them were, but other people were making decisions to bet and and all I could do was prepare myself as as openly as I could and be transparent about my my journey in that role.

Yeah, I think that's really, really good advice. I mean, for what it's worth, like, I think I've had the same experience as you. Like, I feel imposter syndrome all the time. Like, what qualifies me to do the job that I'm doing? And I've always felt it from the time that I was a kid. But I also I also have always had this, it's not even overconfidence.

It's like just crazy curiosity. It's like, I just can't help myself, but like go see what the thing is going to be like. And so, I think, you know, whatever it is, like that is what you just gave people is really good advice. Find that thing inside of you to overcome your imposter syndrome or your hesitancy or you don't feel worthy or prepared and just go do it. And I think it's so spot on. And what I have found, I mean, you're such a great example of this.

Like what, five years ago, you and I didn't even know each other. And now I consider you one of my good friends here at this company. And everybody in every position at the base level is a human and has human emotion about where they are. They've got friends and family connections that kind of are such a part of who they are and their makeup, their history, what they want to accomplish. Those feelings that you have as an individual about whether it's imposter or I'm not ready or we've all been in the same position and might be even at that time. I love how open we've been able to have it at Microsoft on these types of topics.

Finding a place where you can have safe conversations, I've also found is very helpful. Yeah, for sure. Like finding your people where you can just be yourself, super important. That's right. That's right. And that maybe goes back to that connection.

Those might not be people that you work directly with every day, but having that, whether it's, my wife and I have been married 31 years. We went to high school together. And I've often said, Kelly, when I'm standing on stage at E3, she'll say, hey, I remember you as that 17-year-old with a mullet driving your Ford Pinot. So, don't think you're all that. But those people that kind of connect you back to being human and fallible and on your own journey. Yeah, I think that's critically important. It has been for me, absolutely.

Yeah, I could not agree more. So we're almost out of time. The last question I like to ask everyone, and this may be a hard one for you, given that you are maybe the best mix of career and personal I've ever seen. You sort of do what you love. But so, in your spare time, what do you enjoy doing other than gaming, which I know you do a lot?

And snowboarding and reading my comics. You know, what I have found is I just enjoy, it's kind of what you were talking about, that learning process. And, you know, the reason I love snowboarding is because I still think I'm fairly mediocre at it. I go up every weekend with some people that are a lot better than me and I challenge. But I will say the thing that's becoming more and more a part of my lives is my two daughters and as they go into their adult years, they're 26 and 23, and just seeing them, kind of having frankly the same conversation that you and I are having now as they're charting their path is so, so awesome. Like it's just, and I have an infinite amount of time for them and,

and the journey that they're on. They're much better humans than I will ever be. You know that we've talked about what they're doing and, and I, there's, there's just so special. Like I said, Kelly and I have been together for forever and seeing where our daughters are going and they don't always make all the decisions we would make and they go through the same learning journey that we were just talking about. But it's just, it's special, right? It's special to see people who are so important to you finding their own path. And as somebody who's older and seen a few county fairs to give some direction when I can, it's become a really important part of my life. It obviously was for so many years, but now as they're adults, more so. And it's awesome.

That's super cool, man. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. This has been a great conversation. Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate you doing these. Really, congrats. I watched these. I listened to all the guests that you've had. Fantastic job. Really good. Oh, thank you so much. Well, that was Kevin's conversation with Phil Spencer. And oh my gosh, I could have listened to the two of you talk for another couple of hours. I'm not even joking. I would watch or listen to an ongoing conversation with the two of you. I'm not even joking. Like I would watch or listen to an ongoing conversation with the two of you. There's so much interesting things that I got from that. But the thing I wanted to start with, Kevin, you know, over the last four-ish years or however

long we've been doing this podcast, one of the common themes for so many of the technologists that you've talked to has been that they got into and interested in computing through video games. And I know that that's similar for you and I as well. And that's also was kind of a similar origin story for Phil. I'm curious, like, what do you think that it is about games that pulls people in and makes them want to explore other parts of technology, whether it's computing or hardware, or, you know, even like, or even like biotech. What do you think it is about gaming that really has been that kind of draw for so many people

over at this point, so many decades? Yeah, they are really special things. I think one of the things for me at least is they are, or were the really first engaging technical things that I encountered. So, you know, when I was little, you know, the things that I was obsessed with before video games were books and comic books and science fiction. And, you know, they were all things that sort of let me escape the world that I was in and like enter this world of imagination.

And video games were just like all of that turned up to another level. And as soon as I had played a video game on a computer and realized that it was just the thing that someone else had made, I was dying to understand how they worked. And I think it's just a powerful hook for folks who are sort of curious about the things that engage them. And I see it with my youngest daughter, who at 11 years old. And she can't really figure out whether the way that she's going to engage with video games is by learning to code so she can make them herself or by becoming a streamer or an influencer or, you know, YouTuber or TikToker. But like, it's just amazing to me what video games do for people that like make them want to like invest in them beyond just the playing of the game.

Yeah, no, I think about that too. And I think that if I were 11 years old now and not the undisclosed age that I am now, I would be a lot like your daughter and I would be trying to figure out, okay, I know I want to do something with this. And I think you're right. I think it has that pull. It takes you into something else rather than just being a participant where you want to be a creator too. I wanted to ask you, you know, you and Phil talk about so many things, and both of you actually, I think, are really interesting in that you have very strong, like that sort of transition into thinking not just about the things that you're building, but also about the way that the businesses are run? You know, Phil was talking about how thinking about the business model is a pretty core component to gaming, to building games, which I thought was interesting. But I'm curious from your perspective, like, when did you kind of make that switch in your mind from just wanting to focus on the tech to also thinking about some of the bigger business challenges and opportunities?

Yeah, it was a really super clear moment for me. I just realized over a short period of time that the interesting things that we were making with technology were so complicated that there was zero hope that one person was going to build an interesting thing all by themselves. You know, it's still possible, like single creators do all sorts of interesting things. But like a lot of the stuff that runs their world is the effort of lots and lots and lots of people working on things for long periods of time. And I, like, I made my decision to become a manager when I was at Google, and I just sort of looked around me, and we were hiring all of these people. So, I helped start Google's New York engineering office. Like, I think I was the 10th engineer there. My boss, Craig Neville Manning,

had actually started the office, and I was there at the early stages. And we were hiring all of these really great people from Bell Labs and from investment banks. And they were better engineers than I was. I was a pretty good engineer, but we were hiring people that were so much technically better than I was and some of the people who were my computer science heroes who worked at Bell Labs. And I decided that maybe the thing that I could do for them is to help organize the effort that they were undertaking so that they could have as much impact as humanly possible. And like, it was just this crystal clear moment. And I was like, okay, well, I am probably going to be of more service to the people around me by helping to lead them than I will be trying to be one among them as, you know, just another engineer who's not quite as good as they are.

No, that makes sense. I have one more question for you. I know that you told Phil that you don't have time to kind of play games like you used to, but have you been playing any games? Is there any games that you've picked up in the last year or so that you've had fun with? I tend to play these games where I know they don't take much time. So I am embarrassed to say the very first thing that I have to do every morning is I play Wordle, I play the New York Times Spelling Bee, and occasionally I'll do the daily crosswords. And I'm very disappointed in myself when I when I take more than five, more than four

guesses to get the word in Wordle. Like, I track my distribution like crazy. Same. Same here. I actually, I'm one of the weird people who, like, I tend to go to bed after midnight, and so the thing that I go to bed to every night is I play Wordle. And then I'm like, all right, the new Wordle's out, I can play. And then I go to bed either happy with myself or a little bit annoyed and like, all right, tomorrow I'm going is I bought Minecraft Dungeons for my kids to play. And I wound up playing it more than they did just because it was so fun.

That's awesome. That's great. I love it. All right. Well, that does it for today's show. Thank you again to Phil Spencer for joining us. And if you have anything that you would like to share with us, you can email us at BehindTheTech at Microsoft.com. Remember, you can now follow us over on YouTube as

well for full video episodes of Behind the Tech. So if you want to see the video version of this great conversation with Kevin and Phil, be sure to check that out. Thank you so much for joining us. See you next time.