Laura Fryer is one of the original members of the Xbox founding team. In a recent video, she recalled her experience working with Phil Spencer (former Xbox CEO). At the same time, she also revealed for the first time that she was forced to leave the Xbox department after encountering a harassment incident.
Flair reported directly to Xbox founder Seamus Blackley in 2000 (Seamus recently predicted that the entire Xbox division would eventually be shut down under new CEO Asha Sharma). After Blackley left, she was promoted to Director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group.
In this role, she built global Xbox developer support, drove the launch of XNA, created the Xbox Advisory Board, and organized Xbox game developer events around the world.
It happened during one of the events. At the 2004 GDC conference, Fryer and his team officially released XNA, a game development framework created by Microsoft to help developers (especially independent developers) develop games for Xbox and Windows PC more easily. XNA is built on .NET and provides a complete set of tools and class libraries, shielding a large number of underlying hardware details, allowing developers to focus on the game logic itself without having to deal with platform-related underlying code.
Fryer recalled:
"After a great day of successfully demoing XNA on stage, I went to the hotel room with a publicist and an Xbox executive to get a few controllers. The next second I was handed a bathrobe and asked to put it on. I laughed it off as a joke and got out of there as fast as I could, but I was freaking out.
I didn't really think much about it at the time, until after I returned to the company the second week, I was suddenly told that I was going to "reorganize and leave my post." "
Later, she confided in a friend within Microsoft. While she was still hesitating, the friend took the initiative to report the situation to human resources. In her own words, “everything has changed dramatically” since then:
"Unfortunately, even though another client in the room corroborated my story, it didn't work. I was pushed out and no one wanted to help me. My career went from a high to a toxic one."
Later, she mentioned that it was Phil Spencer who helped get her on the publishing team:
That's when Phil stepped up. He told me directly: "Don't wait, come to my team and work for Bonnie. He was so kind and considerate, and he almost begged me to come on board and work with Epic. He knew we had a strong partnership and really needed my help. And just like that, my nightmare was over."
After that, Fryer participated in the release of a number of important Xbox titles, including "Gears of War" and "Gears of War 2". She eventually left Microsoft in 2009 to join Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment as general manager of its Seattle studio.
In the video, Fryer said her experience showed that Microsoft's corporate culture was beginning to break down at the time. By the time Phil Spencer took over the Xbox business a few years later, this cultural problem had "completely collapsed." She believes it will take a "rare genius" to fix the situation.
She finally said that she didn't know whether Spencer knew all the details of that incident, but no matter what, she would be grateful that he was there when she needed it most.
In her telling, Spencer is portrayed as a man of rare sincerity and humanity - a man who was willing to put himself out there, listen, problem-solve and put people before politics in difficult moments in an industry and corporate environment that didn't always reward goodwill.
She also mentioned another experience: Spencer personally accompanied her to fly to meet with the Sigil Games team to resolve a dispute over the release of the MMORPG "Vanguard: Saga of Heroes". The game was originally planned to be published by Microsoft. Spencer gave a balanced hearing to both sides during the meeting.
Flair's assessment of Spencer was largely in line with what other big names in the industry have said. As she said, Spencer did make mistakes, but he was a man who truly loved the game and a leader who showed genuine care when dealing with sensitive matters.
As for the future performance of the new Microsoft gaming business CEO, it remains to be seen.