Finishing up our conversation with Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, we put him through a lightning round-style series of questions we affectionately dubbed, “What would it take?”

With what would be our last question, we asked what it would take to see Alan Wake 2 on Xbox One and Windows PC.

Spencer furrowed his brow and looked up to the ceiling.

“How do I put this?” he asked, pausing for a long moment.

“Well, the developer… the developer has to want to make the game,” he eventually finished as a PR minder stepped in to end the interview.

Alan Wake 2’s release, or lack thereof, seems to boil down to bad timing. While Spencer seems quite receptive to talk Alan Wake 2 now, that didn’t seem to be the case a couple of years back.

“We showed [Alan Wake 2] to Microsoft and I guess at the time Microsoft was looking for something slightly different for their portfolio,” Remedy’s Sam Lake said, reflecting on the project back in 2015.

Those talks with Microsoft led to Quantum Break, a Xbox One and Windows PC title that leveraged the publisher’s now-defunct television department.

Today, Remedy is expanding into multiplayer, building up their proprietary engine, Northlight.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom.

“[Microsoft] have been really supportive about Alan Wake and [now head of Xbox] Phil Spencer has been awesomely supportive when it comes to Remedy and Alan Wake along the way,” Lake said in 2015.

With Lake seeming encouraged by Spencer’s openness to the Alan Wake franchise back in 2015 — and Spencer reaffirming that again — maybe Alan Wake 2 is closer than we think.

Click here for more with Spencer. We’ll have more with the Head of Xbox in the coming weeks.