IGN Live interviewed the Xbox boss and he touched on several topics in his interview, including confirming that more of their games will be multiplatform, not just the few that have already made it to PlayStation 5 or Nintendo Switch.
For example, he made this telling statement about the long-rumored Xbox handheld: “The future for us in hardware is pretty awesome and the work the team is doing around different form factors and different ways to play is something I’m incredibly excited about. Today was about the games. We showed off a new all-digital Xbox Series X console. We will have a time to come out and talk more about the platform. But I think we should have a handheld as well,” Spencer said. Will it be cloud-based like PlayStation Portal? Spencer says it’s really important to be able to run games locally, so the answer is probably no.
He then mentioned that DOOM: The Dark Ages is also coming to PlayStation 5 (so it was announced as multiplatform right away), and that they may decide to do the same for other first-party titles later on: “With DOOM, it’s definitely one of those franchises that has a history on so many devices. It’s a franchise that I think everyone deserves to play. I was in a meeting with Marty (Stratton of id Software) and the team a couple of years ago and I asked Marty what he wanted to do and he said he wanted to release it on all platforms. I said let’s do that. It was as simple as that.
I get a lot of questions about, hey, if I’m an Xbox owner, what does that mean? What I want to say, and I thought it showed up so well on the show today, you saw an amazing collection of games that are coming to Xbox, that they’re going into Game Pass on day one. Game Pass showed up so well. If you buy the game on our console, you can play it on the PC with the cross-entitlement stuff. We’re also focused on future hardware with forward compatibility. Our commitment to our Xbox customers is that you’re going to have the opportunity to buy or subscribe to the game. We’re going to support the game on other screens, and you’re going to see more of our games on more platforms, and we just see that as a benefit to the franchises that we’re building,” Spencer added.
Microsoft is seeing more console users than ever before and is seeing at least 10% growth in console game sales each year, but Spencer also mentioned PC and cloud growth. But they will eventually hit a ceiling.
Source: WCCFTech
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