Obsidian Entertainment joined Xbox thanks to Phil Spencer's "no BS" attitude.
Back in 2018, Microsoft struck a deal with the 'Neverwinter Nights 2' and 'Pillars of Eternity' developer to bring it into its roster of first-party studios, with the promise that they could retain their creative freedom and culture being a big plus.
Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart told IGN: "I didn't know Phil Spencer well at that time, I probably only talked to him once or twice up to that point.
"But what's so interesting with Phil is he is this - I don't know - I don't want to say 'persona' in the end, because he is Phil Spencer and because he runs all Microsoft games.
"But now knowing him, and even what I knew about him back then, his reputation was just someone who was authentic and someone who doesn't BS and loves games. And that was the trust in that."
Meanwhile, Mary McGuane - now serving as studio general manager at Xbox Game Studios for Obsidian, Double Fine, and inXile after 20 years with Microsoft - has commented on how the gaming giant changed its approach.
In 2018, she was working as Xbox Games Studios' chief of staff, and she insisted there was a shift four years earlier with Xbox bought Mojang.
She explained: “Before [Mojang], it was: you’re a part of Microsoft. One day you’re [part] of this studio, the next day you’re fully Microsoft. And it had… varying success, I’ll say.
"So with Mojang, there was an approach taken that we like to call minimal integration, where we looked at the stuff we really needed to have fully integrated: and that’s like IT stuff and security policy, that kind of stuff.
"But then we really tried to create stability in these studios to not have the acquisition be something where the whole studio lost focus, where the studio was now trying to figure out this thing called Microsoft.”
