It’s no coincidence that more and more of Microsoft’s games are showing up on rival consoles (Hi-Fi Rush is now available on PlayStation 5, for example), and the Xbox boss has also talked about wanting to see more online stores on consoles.

Polygon sat down with Phil Spencer at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) to talk about a number of topics. For example, he talked about how the mass layoffs (1900 people were let go) were due to the slowing growth of the gaming industry, he wants to see the Epic Games Store and itch.io on consoles (interestingly, he left out Steam), and he also said that part of the appeal to Generation Z (those born between 1995 and 2009) is that more Xbox exclusives are becoming multiplatform…

“I would say the thing that worries me the most about the industry is the lack of growth. And when you have an industry that’s projected to be smaller next year in terms of players and dollars, and you have a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show growth to their investors – because why else would you own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not growing? – The side of the business that gets scrutinized is the cost side. Because if you’re not growing the revenue side, then the cost side is going to be questioned.

We’re a business. I’ve said that time and time again. I don’t have the luxury of not running a profitable, growing business inside Microsoft. And we are today. But just across the industry — you mentioned it, and as I sit here at GDC, I think about friends of mine in the industry who have been displaced and lost their jobs, and how just, I don’t want this industry to be a place where people can’t confidently build a career. So that’s why I keep coming back to: How does this industry get back to growth? But to your question, for us as Xbox or any of the teams that are out there, it’s really a result of an industry that’s not growing. It can grow and it will grow again. But you are seeing this time right now and the consequences have human consequences. And we should all reflect and think about that.

This notion that Xbox can just be this one device that plugs into a TV, we don’t see that in the Gen Z research. Because nothing else is like that for them. Some of them will have an iPhone, some of them will have an Android, but all the games and everything is the same. I can still get to TikTok on both, at least for now. All their stuff is available wherever they want it. So for Xbox, our brand pivot – as we attract and maintain relevance with a younger audience – is ‘Xbox is a place where I can find the great games I want. [Think about our history as the Windows company. Nobody would blink twice if I said, ‘Hey, if you’re using a PC, you get to choose the kind of experience you have [by choosing where you buy games]. There’s real value in that,” Spencer said.

In any case, it makes you wonder why online PC game stores are not available on the console. How would Microsoft make this happen?

Source: WCCFTech, VGC, Polygon