Phil Spencer

Phil Spencer (born 1968) has spent his entire career at Microsoft, rising from a 1988 internship to head of Xbox in 2014 and CEO of Microsoft Gaming in 2022, where he oversees Xbox, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and Minecraft. He is widely credited with rehabilitating the Xbox brand through Game Pass, backward compatibility, and studio acquisitions.

Muse and the preservation argument

In February 2025, Xbox announced Muse, a generative AI model built with Microsoft Research and Ninja Theory that can generate game visuals and controller actions, trained on seven years of gameplay data from the multiplayer title Bleeding Edge. Spencer’s framing was distinctive: rather than pitching AI-generated content, he argued models that learn how old games play could carry titles off dying hardware — “Time will erode the amount of hardware that’s out there that can actually play a game” — making classics portable to any platform where the model runs.

Game historians pushed back hard. Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi called the idea “like saying a photocopy of a painting is ‘preservation’… I’m offended and sickened by this,” while VGHF library director Phil Salvador quipped that generative AI preserves games “in the sense that mirages are a great source of water.” Critics also noted the irony of an industry that fought archivists’ legal exemptions now offering AI facsimiles instead.

Spencer has kept Microsoft Gaming on an aggressively AI-forward path regardless, with Muse positioned as the first of a family of models for prototyping, ideation, and eventually player-facing experiences. That stance puts him directly opposite figures like Shigeru Miyamoto, whose Nintendo has made a point of going “a different direction” — and even Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson, who urges the world to reject AI outright while Microsoft embeds it in his game’s ecosystem.