If "Starfield" had received its original release date, I would have played it by now. Bethesda's Space is the Place RPG was scheduled to launch on November 11, exactly 11 years after the release of Skyrim; Arkane's co-op vampire shooter Redfall did not have a firm release date, but Bethesda had not announced that Starfield and " How does Microsoft, which spent $7.5 billion to acquire Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax, feel about these two major titles being delayed? According to Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft's gaming division, they actually feel pretty good.

Speaking on The Verge (opens in new tab) Decoder podcast, Spencer said, "We've experienced shipping games too early. But in hindsight, games like 'Starfield' took a lot of time and the team had a lot of investment in new IP.

Spencer said that the financial impact of these decisions was obviously taken into consideration, but added, "Starfield and Redfall were the first big Xbox games ZeniMax added to the team, and I just felt that the support these teams would get from the Xbox I just wanted to make sure that they felt like they had the support that they could get from Xbox. You may feel some of the benefits of being part of a larger organization that has other revenue streams and other things going on.

Starfield's announcement of the postponement was not a huge surprise. As Rich Stanton pointed out at the time, "The game is clearly a vast, huge new IP that is supposed to be a huge technological leap forward, but six months past its release, we had seen nothing." Nevertheless, Chris Livingston did not expect the news and said, "It's not a lot of money, but I would have bet money that Starfield would have made it in time for the day it was announced. It's not a lot of money; something like $28." Spencer, who has been with Microsoft for 34 years, was a fan of Encarta, the CD-ROM encyclopedia, before becoming the official Xbox rep.

"As someone who has seen a few county fairs here and there, I might get a hunch about where we are," Spencer said. But I want teams to feel that their schedule is their own. If teams feel that they own the destiny of their game, they can deliver better. So we wait for real cues from the creative and production teams."

Currently, both "Starfield" and "Redfall" are scheduled for release in the first half of 2023, and Xbox studio head Matt Booty is keen for people to know that "Starfield" is not just a "reskin" of "Skyrim" He wants to, while Arkane's Harvey Smith is trying to make it clear that "Redfall" has the DNA of "Dishonored" by asserting that his studio's game is actually similar to past hits.