Spencer says the team started from the right place. He’s not referencing when the Xbox One launched in November 2013, but when he was promoted to division head the following April after a months-long whirlwind of controversy. "Let's give gamers choice," he says of the mentality he brought to the job. That decision has sparked one of the more remarkable gaming turnarounds in recent memory. Going from pissing off players to pleasing them is a rare feat in an industry whose dedicated fan base does not forgive easily.

"Let's give gamers choice."

Don Mattrick, the public face of the Xbox entertainment mindset, left the company to join Zynga shortly after Microsoft's unpleasant E3 showing. Spencer, having run Microsoft's internal game studios, took charge eight months later in an expanded role that put him in charge of the entire business.

Spencer has in the past acknowledged the woes of the early Xbox One days, when Sony's competing PS4 was crushing it in sales and the Japanese game maker was taking monthly victory laps in the form of press releases. When he took the job, Spencer said outright in a video published online that Microsoft made the wrong decisions and that it would now need "to revisit those decisions."

Under his direction, Microsoft announced at E3 this past June that the Xbox One would gain backwards compatibility from an upcoming system update. The solution was a complex software emulation that would run on the Xbox One and let you play your old Xbox 360 games. It was a defining moment for the Xbox One, enticing the millions who had invested money into the software of the previous generation to finally upgrade to the current one.

Backwards compatibility was a defining moment for the Xbox One

There is also Windows 10. The new Microsoft operating system, released in July, made plans to marry the Xbox platform to the PC. The announcement of a Windows-powered Xbox App, that allows players to stream games from their Xbox One to their computer, created some good will for PC gamers who felt Microsoft had left it behind for the console arena. And when Xbox is updated in November with Windows 10, console gamers will have a reason to start spending some money on Windows apps as well.

Spencer says that the Windows 10 launch working in parallel with the Xbox One’s gaining momentum wasn’t planned. "It just happened to come along at the same time, which made it a really interesting time to be on the Xbox team," he says. It's still a work in progress. The company has also enabled cross-play and cross-buy features to sweeten the experience of purchasing titles across devices. In a partnership with Oculus announced in June, Xbox One games will be playable on a virtual reality theatre inside the Oculus Rift headset, which launches next spring. And there are signs of some more exciting developments yet to be announced — Spencer has hinted in the past that streaming from PC to Xbox One may be in the cards.

"We want to lead and we want to be bold."

It's those kinds of partnerships and technical feats that Spencer wants Microsoft to get behind. "We want to lead and we want to be bold," he says. However, that also means preparing gamers for the inevitable end of buying discs and, in an ironic twist, an acceptance of many of the elements Microsoft tried to instill in the original Xbox One vision. It's part of gradual move within the console gaming industry toward games-as-services that resemble the more lucrative and longer-lasting titles found on PC and mobile.

"It is a business. Not every gamer is going to love it," Spencer says, recalling the initial backlash Microsoft faced for trying to force change on consumers. Yet whether those changes one day mean not having the ability to sell back your games for cash — because they exist only digitally — or at some point needing an internet connection most of the time to play, Microsoft has learned a better way of communicating how it moves forward. Spencer calls it the "lens of the console gamer."

"Gamers sense that the team understands them and hears them," he says, "and wants to do the right thing."