A bit of a bold comment by the head of Xbox.
„Frankly, held back is a meme that gets created by people who are too caught up in device competition. I just look at Windows. It’s almost certain if the developer is building a Windows version of their game, then the most powerful and highest fidelity version is the PC version. You can even see that with some of our first-party console games going to PC, even from our competitors, that the richest version is the PC version. Yet the PC ecosystem is the most diverse when it comes to hardware when you think about the CPUs and GPUs from years ago that are there.
Yes, every developer is going to find a line and say that this is the hardware that I am going to support, but the diversity of hardware choice in PC has not held back the highest-fidelity PC games on the market. The highest-fidelity PC games rival anything that anybody has ever seen in video games. So this idea that developers don’t know how to build games, or game engines, or ecosystems, that work across a set of hardware… there’s a proof point in PC that shows that’s not the case,” Phil Spencer told Gamesindustry. They still make developers make games for almost seven-year-old hardware, which could be complicated.
He also reiterated Microsoft’s strategy: „Our device is not the centre of our strategy, our game is not the centre of the strategy. We want to enable you to play the games you want to play with the friends you want to play with, on any device. On TV, the Xbox console is going to be the best way to play console games. Xbox Series X is the most powerful console out there and it will have absolutely the best versions of our console games. But that’s not to exclude other people from being able to play.
Gaming is about entertainment and community and diversion and learning new stories and new perspectives, and I find it completely counter to what gaming is about to say that part of that is to lock people away from being able to experience those games. Or to force someone to buy my specific device on the day that I want them to go buy it, to partake in what gaming is about. Gaming is bigger than any one device, and that is something as an industry that we’ve embraced all up as we bring more and more players in. I think it’s vital to the role that gaming can play on the planet,” Spencer added.
He also confirmed that Microsoft isn’t stopping the acquisition of further studios to join the Xbox Game Studios family: „We acquired quite a few new studios in a short amount of time, and we want to make sure that those studios are on-boarded in the right way. As Matt and I were talking about it, we just wanted to make sure that we treated the incoming studios as full parts of the organisation. That they felt supported. The [Xbox] Game Pass portfolio and subscriber base continue to grow. We’re launching a new console. Last year was our biggest year ever on PC in terms of revenue as Xbox Game Studios. A lot of the business is doing well, so we’re always in the market for new opportunities with studios.
The priority was making sure the studios had the things that they needed to build the best versions of their games. That means extending some of the timelines and giving them more budgets. We have really strong support from Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, and Amy Hood, the CFO. And there’s been no signal at all that we should be slowing down, but just to go at a pace that is maintainable for us as a leadership team. We’re always out there talking to people. But it has to be the right opportunity,” he concluded.
Will Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment join them…?
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