After a week of Microsoft shutting down much-loved game studios like The Evil Within and Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks, as well as Arkane Austin, best known for Prey and Dishonored, one player decided to take justice into their own hands. They got one over on Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer (P3) by nuking his camp in Fallout 76.
The act of vengeance was first spotted by a Fallout 76 player on Twitter early this morning, who posted a picture of their server’s map which shows a massive red circle around P3’s camp. The apparent culprit then replied to the post with a video of him walking around P3’s camp surrounded by a nuclear red mist, a screenshot of him encountering P3 in the wild, and a caption that just read “guilty”.
It’s pretty well known at this point that Phil Spencer’s gamertag is P3. Apart from including it in all his public socials, he also tweeted about its origins back in 2018: “It’s a nickname from my youth. I have the same name as my father and grandfather, so I’m the third. Growing up at family events, I was P3.”
Spencer used to have quite a lot of respect in the gaming community, partly thanks to his well-known gamertag and avid gaming habits, like 100%ing Vampire Survivors. There’s even a sizable thread on Xbox Series X’s Reddit discussing how many games Spencer plays and why it’s so cool. “One of the things I love about Xbox is that I can add/follow Phil on my friends list and see what he’s playing or has played in the past,” one player says in the Reddit post. “Yesterday I was looking through what he was enjoying currently, and I was blown away by how much he actually plays. I knew he played, but I didn’t know just how much. It’s refreshing and reassuring knowing Phil is playing this much, and it kind of makes me proud to be an Xbox fan.”
However, over the years, the players have become less and less enthusiastic about Spencer’s love for gaming, cutting him less slack for his relatability as Microsoft has made some upsetting choices in the last few years. Whether that’s closing down Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin or cutting 1,900 jobs weeks after it’s valued as a $2.9 trillion company.
There’s certainly not a lot of sympathy in the replies to the video of his camp getting nuked. The top comment just reads, “Thank you for your service,” and almost all of the replies below it have a similar vibe, with many calling it justice for the recent closures. But considering how easy it is for high-level players to obtain and use nukes (we’ve even fallen victim to a radioactive death), this reaction isn’t entirely surprising.
The nuking of Spencer’s camp obviously doesn’t lessen the impact of this week’s layoffs, but it is pretty telling of how attitudes towards Microsoft are shifting, and is in its own way, some good old-fashioned frontier justice.