Phil Spencer

Phil Spencer is an American business executive who led Microsoft's Xbox division for over a decade. He joined Microsoft as an intern in 1988 and spent his entire career at the company, taking charge of Xbox in March 2014 and being named the first CEO of Microsoft Gaming in January 2022, a title created as Microsoft moved to acquire Activision Blizzard. Across 38 years at Microsoft, 12 of them leading its gaming business, he became one of the most recognizable figures in the industry.

Spencer is most associated with Xbox Game Pass, the subscription service that reshaped how Microsoft sold games; with restoring backward compatibility to the Xbox platform; and with a run of major acquisitions, including Mojang (2014), Bethesda parent ZeniMax (2021), and the roughly 75 billion dollar purchase of Activision Blizzard (completed 2023) that nearly tripled the size of Microsoft's gaming business. He also championed the Xbox Adaptive Controller and cross-platform play.

He was an outspoken advocate for game preservation. In a 2017 interview he framed video games as an art form worth keeping accessible, comparing replaying old games to revisiting classic films, books, and albums, and argued that games becoming "unplayable for technical reasons" is a bad outcome. In 2021 he called for an industry-wide effort toward legal emulation so modern hardware could run older games. For many players those statements made him the public face of the promise that an Xbox library would stay playable.

On February 20, 2026, Microsoft announced that Spencer would retire, stepping down as Microsoft Gaming CEO on February 23 and remaining in an advisory role through the summer to support the handover.