“We think about our console as part of the environment you live in as our customer,” says Phil Spencer, executive vice president of gaming at Microsoft. “While there’s an opening of the box and you want that to be fantastic, once you put that console wherever you put it, we hope you never have to touch it again, hope you never have to hear from it again, and it just plays great games. . . . It’s not the center of attention.“
We really built this strategy around that—play the games you want, with the people you want, on the devices you want or already have,” says Spencer. Why? Because in the year 2020, when dozens of mobile devices from all sorts of manufacturers play
Fortnite just fine, a box you buy every eight or so years to play new video games on your TV is a dated idea. Which is why Microsoft designed the new consoles, not as the star of the show, but as one component in its larger Xbox ecosystem, which includes a subscription called Game Pass and the option to stream these games to Android phones on xCloud. Plus, in an unprecedented move, last-generation Xboxes will play many upcoming Xbox games, like the next
Halo. And the new Xboxes will play all the old Xbox games people already have.
Of course when I buy a game I should be able to continue to play that game [on the next generation],” Spencer says. “Console gaming is the only space out there where you lose access to [software purchases]. Can you imagine if that were true with phones or PCs?
