Phil Spencer has been a major voice for change in the video game industry as of late. With his leading of the ongoing battles against toxicity in multiplayer, and a shifting strategy at Xbox, the executive has been positioning themselves as a major player in what could be a new games industry. And with a recent announcement, it seems like that strategy is intensifying in new ways.
Phil Spencer has said he doesn’t appreciate next-gen exclusives as a being used as a sales tactic. Microsoft will work toward having better reach across various next-gen platforms with the Xbox Series X. The tactic has already seen some play over at Sony who has said that titles announced for the new console won’t release on PlayStation 4. Microsoft will be taking a different path, aiming for maximum penetration. Microsoft has announced Halo Infinite will be coming to Xbox One, Xbox Series X, as well as PC.
“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,” Microsoft’s EVP at gaming told GamesIndustry International.
This is something that Spencer has hinted at before, and now we get more details.
Going further, he said that the entire process of forcing gamers to buy something to enjoy the hobby isn’t part of his vision. He wants people to buy into the Xbox Series X because they care. Not because the company behind it wants “to force someone to buy my specific device on the day that I want them to go buy it, in order to partake in what gaming is about.”
Speaking about other aspects of the new console generation, Spencer had something to say about the idea of the current generation holding back the progress of the Xbox Series X. Spencer believes that “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,” he said.
“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,” Spencer said, concluding his remarks
