Phil gave them six fucking years.
Look Im all for blaming Phil for everything, but he delayed Halo, Starfield, Redfall and Forza all by a full year. At some point, the devs have to take responsibility. what the fuck were they doing for six years? ok, so you rebuilt all 20 tracks from scratch. so thats 3.5 tracks per year? what? surely they can be more productive than that.
We need to start holding devs more accountable instead of blaming unlikeable execs and greedy publishers like EA. EA actually delayed Dead Space, Star Wars, Immortals, and didnt force cross gen on any of their developers. Even NFS was allowed to be next gen only. They reduced the work needed for devs, they allowed them to hit a higher fidelity, AND they delayed the games out of holiday season and fiscal year deadlines. And the devs still produced some of the worst optimized, most unpolished titles ever released. Sorry, im not blaming the EA CEO for this.