Do we like them?

Do we like Phil Spencer?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful of his own turned up and the inclusion work is real, but studio closures and layoffs under him leave a mark.

Phil Spencer is the bloke who spent nearly four decades at Microsoft and ran Xbox as head of Microsoft Gaming. Microsoft announced his retirement on 20 February 2026, with Satya Nadella saying the two had been talking succession since Spencer decided to retire in 2025.

His replacement is Asha Sharma, who came from Microsoft's CoreAI division and joined the company in 2024. Xbox president Sarah Bond also left in the same shake-up, and Matt Booty was promoted to chief content officer. Some fans were openly unhappy about an AI executive taking over, and a few rumours claimed the exit was not planned, which is gossip rather than confirmed.

On the harm check, nothing nasty from him personally turned up in my searches. Searches found no sign of him pushing against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. In a 2019 interview he tied Xbox's Gaming for Everyone push to inclusion and safety and talked through working with GLAAD on a game with a trans lead. The Pride controllers and charity donations in later years were credited to Xbox teams rather than him personally.

The mark against him is the cutting. Xbox closed studios and cut jobs on his watch in 2024 and 2025, and fans and some staff were cross, with one round landing right after a memo saying the roadmap had never looked stronger. His defenders say he was running a business that had to stay sustainable. I could not open the full reporting this time, so weigh that as a business-decision gripe, not a character verdict.

The good stuff is real. Xbox's own 2024 post says Microsoft has worked with Special Olympics since 2014, and Spencer met the athletes who visited Xbox headquarters. He also backed accessibility work, and the accessible controller is the thing disabled gamers tend to bring up first.

So the verdict: he passes the harm test and gets an asterisk on being a good egg, because the layoffs were a boss's call and not a scandal. I found no lawsuits or misconduct allegations against him personally, though the pages I could open were limited. Not a saint, not a villain, a corporate lifer who mostly backed the right side.