I am not a big fan of Spencer and his 'WE MUST DO BETTER' rhetoric going on for six years now, but he has since brought the receipts and has shown he's serious about building up a first party portfolio.
The only problem is that he took too long and cancelled games that didnt need to be cancelled. had the coalation new ip not been cancelled, had he not cancelled fable 4, had he not cancelled scalebound, he wouldnt have been in this situation in the first place and xbox owners who arent in love with the brand would've been a whole lot happier with their purchase.
So what's next? I hope he learns from shoving multiplayer into single player games like Sunset and Fable and you know NOT do that. i hope he ditches gears and halo, two franchises with zero characters that can be taken seriously as dramatic characters. As iconic as Master Chief is, he's basically a mute protaganist. they tried pairing him up with Cortana to get a nice romance going and it fell flat. Now they are trying to get people invested into the gears cast but its really fucking hard.
Go small with characters, start fresh and ditch the big aging franchises. Sony devs have shown how you can take big ideas like a zombie game, a post apocalyptic scifi game and a norse mythology game and just make it intimate story about finding out who you are. i swear to god i dont remember a single character's name in the last two halo games.
With next gen, i think they are in a fantastic position to really set the standard for next gen games. They have two shooter studios and one RPG studio. That's going to be their big advantage over Sony which has sadly pigeonholed itself into third person action adventure games. But MS has to innovate and set the standard like Halo CE did back in the day. they need to have games that look and play like nothing else on the market. With Halo being cross gen and gears releasing this late, i dont know if thats possible but they do have 13 other studios who can fill in the gap at the start of this gen with some truly unique titles. Sony will come at MS with the full force of gorgeous looking setpiece and cutscene heavy games, but MS can counter with games that truly take advantage of the massive CPU and SSD jumps.
I thought this e3 was the perfect time for MS to really show us their next gen vision but they just showed us a cross gen cutscene. maybe they are not ready, but i hope for their sake they offer gamers truly unique gameplay experiences ubisoft, ea and activision have refused to give us this gen and i suspect they will continue to do that next gen. MS needs to take up the mantle next gen. I became team Sony back at the start of the PS3 gen when their backs were against the wall and they started producing one great exclusive after another. everyone raves about 2009, but to me 2007 was Sony's coming out party. Motorstorm, heavenly sword, warhawk, uncharted, ratchet all releasing in one year and while they werent the best games out that year, they convinced me that Sony could create quality games despite hitting rock bottom. MS can do the same starting next gen.