Phil Spencer: "There's no way we want to turn everyone into a subscriber"

February 11th, 2020, 21:03 Posted By: wraggster

The Xbox Series X may be on the horizon, but Xbox head Phil Spencer hasn't been coy about the fact that hardware is far from the company's only angle into the next generation.
In a recent discussion with GamerTag radio, Spencer discussed the company's plans for the future as a multi-angled approach with the "player at the center." That means, he said, that not only are Xbox Series X consoles and gaming PCs important to Microsoft, but xCloud and Game Pass are equally important components, as they give the ability to play games to those who can't afford higher-end hardware or even $60 games.
That desire to appeal to a much broader audience than just hardcore PC or console players ties directly in with Matt Booty's recent comments on exclusivity -- specifically, that Xbox's future first-party titles would be compatible across all Microsoft hardware, including Xbox One, Windows PC, and future consoles.
Spencer addressed those comments further as he continued:
"Specifically on exclusives or non-exclusives, one of the benefits that we have just sitting inside of Microsoft is we've obviously been close to the development of what's been going on with PC for years," he said. "And I think today if we look at the PC ecosystem, we see some of the best, highest-fidelity games anywhere sitting on high-end gaming PCs, and some of those same games are actually able to run on PCs that are a few years old that have much less capability. And the state of engines and capability today means that developers have the capability to take full use of the gaming hardware that's in front of them.
"Obviously we built our strategy with Series X, we started with that in mind. We wanted to go build a gaming console that was going to be the absolute best that we could deliver on a television, and deliver unique capability to creators that they could use to go create the best games. But you don't want to do that to the exclusion of everybody else and you also want to do that hand-in-hand with developers because developers want to find the widest audience possible. And yes, there are always trade-offs in what you're going to do from developing each individual game.
"And I'm not gonna dictate to every third-party studio what they have to support, but what we see in today's world is that gamers want to play games with their friends regardless of what device those friends are on, people want to have the largest selection of games open to them, and developers want to make use of the best in technology that's available. And we built this plan with all three of those as inputs and we feel really good about where we are."

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