Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, has expressed that the Redmond-based company is intentionally thinking in more than just game consoles for gaming.

Spencer told Gamesindustry that Xbox Live is in a good place: it has more than 100 million monthly users across Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android. Those who want to play Minecraft on Switch have to sign up for an Xbox Live account. The PlayStation 4 users don’t unless they want to do cross-play – in that case, having an Xbox Live account is necessary.

„We need to be on all the places where people might want to go play, and our xCloud strategy allows us to do that, where any place, any device that people might be able to play an Xbox game, we want to be able to deliver that. Consoles are, what, a 200-million unit market? It has its geographies where it is, but there are a lot of geographies where consoles are never going to be a dominant form of people playing, and through technologies like cloud and xCloud, we’re going to be able to take these games and deliver them to new players,” Spencer said. Places like South America would likely support the xCloud. Brazil has a lot of taxes on the game consoles. Meanwhile, North America and Europe are indeed focused on game consoles.

Spencer also said how the xCloud can benefit the game developers: „For the creators, they just build the game that they were always just going to create on the platform that they’ve been building on for years, and yet find millions and millions of new customers. That is exciting for the studios.”

He also talked about Mixer, which started as Beam, and Microsoft acquired it in 2016. The site, meant to be a competitor to Twitch, signed a few bigger streamers, but they have all left by now. „It’s a disappointment when you try to grow something to the scale it needs to get to and you don’t get there. I don’t have regrets. You make decisions with the best information you have at the time, you apply your best effort, and we’re in a creative industry. We are in a hits-driven industry.” Spencer said.

He added that he is proud to work for Microsoft, as this is a company that isn’t afraid to try new things, even if they fail. (For Nintendo, it could be the Wii U. Sony has the PlayStation Portable Go that lacked a UMD drive, and Microsoft can consider the Xbox’ flop altogether in Japan until now.) „That is just the art of making video games, and frankly game platforms,” he added.

Microsoft’s efforts in live streaming will be focused on Facebook Gaming, but the dashboard of the Xbox One will not include Zuckerberg’s logo like it had Mixer in the past.

Source: GameSpot, GameSpot

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