The head of Xbox,  Phil Spencer also talked about the virtual reality in a lengthy interview with the GamerTag podcast.

Spencer said that the first step towards a player-centric approach was taken in the Spring of 2016 when they announced the Xbox One games would also be on PC, too: „[…] Today, people play games on a ton of different devices. And that is something that has really led to gaming’s growth. I mean, it’s almost a cliche now as I’ve said so often there were 2 billion people who play video games. That number is expected to grow to 4 billion in the next decade. It’s growth for our industry, which leads to some of the best creations that we’ve ever seen because creators are finding new customers, new gamers are coming in all the time. And I think our job as a platform is to create the broadest platform for gamers so they can find the broadest set of games that they could go play so they can find great games that they want to go play by themselves or go play great games with their friends. That was my long-winded side. But so what we’re trying to do is put the player at the centre and say, if you’re a gamer and you want to go play the highest-fidelity experiences on your TV or on your PC, we want to give you the ability to do that. If you’re somebody who is playing games, and you’re never going to own a console, you’re never going to own a gaming PC, we’re obviously investing in Project xCloud and things to make that possible so you can play games on those devices. Even business models, because not everybody can afford to go out and spend 60 bucks on a new game, people want to play more games. So you look at something like Xbox Game Pass which is really an evolution of the business model of games so that it gives people another option to build a library of games that they can go play. Now, specifically on exclusives or not exclusives, I mean, one of the benefits that we have just sat inside of Microsoft is we’ve obviously been close to the development of what’s been going on a PC for years, right. And I think today if we look at the PC ecosystem, we’d say some of the 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 finally have the capability to take full use of the gaming hardware that’s in front of them. Obviously, we built our strategy with Xbox Series X. We started with that in mind, if we wanted to go build a gaming console, that was going to be the absolute best that we could deliver on a TV 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 at the same time. And yes, there are always trade-offs on what you’re going to do from developing each individual game. And I’m not going to go dictate to every studio, every third party studio, kind of what they have to go support. But what we see in today’s world is 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 be able to make use of absolutely the best in the technology that’s available. We built this plan with all three of those as inputs, and we feel really good about where we are,” Spencer said.

He also explained his VR comments that we discussed before: „I probably overstated and I wasn’t trying to take anything away from people who love VR and the experiences that are being built, no disrespect to any of the teams there. Ryan Payton, a good friend of mine, he’s getting ready to ship Iron Man VR. And you know, there’s a lot of people I know that are working on some good VR titles, great VR titles, and I’m not trying to not be supportive of that to use a double negative. But my main point was, I wanted to be clear with our customers on where our focus was so that if somebody was waiting for us to bring out a VR headset for Xbox Series X at the launch or something I was just trying to say we’re not going to do that. I understand certain people would want that, we have to focus our efforts on the things that we’re doing right now. And the most precious resource that we have is the team and their ability.

VR is not just as simple as plugging your headset, you have to redo the dash like there’s a bunch of work that goes into it. And the teams at Valve, the teams at Sony, the teams at Oculus that are doing that work there. They know the completeness and what it means to support that platform. Obviously, obviously, VR is big on Windows today, we are the Windows company and we’re never going to close our eyes to where things are going. So I don’t hope it goes away. I hope it gets bigger. I hope it’s something that’s just so important that there would be no brainer for us to support it. My main point in that statement wasn’t to chide anybody who’s working on VR, anything but really just about the stuff that we’re focused on right now. And that’s not part of the equation right now,” he added.

The Xbox Series X will launch this Holiday season.

Source: WCCFTech

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