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Microsoft has no desire to launch a new Xbox platform every few years, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has told Game Informer.
Spencer says it’s “hard to tell” if console gaming consumers will need to buy refreshed hardware on a more regular basis, but says he has no “desire to every two years have a new console on the shelf; that’s not part of the console business model, and it doesn’t actually help us”.
He continued: “The best customer I have is somebody who buys the original Xbox and just buys all the games. That’s the best customer for us in terms of the pure financials of it. I don’t have a need to get you to go buy the newest console, or I don’t have the need to create an artificial loop of, “Here’s a new console every two years,” in order to get you to go buy.”
Spencer added: “I don’t know what the next thing is past Scorpio right now… I’m not trying to turn consoles into the graphics card market where every so often Nvidia or AMD come out with a new card, and if I want a little bit more performance I’m going to go buy that new card. I think for consoles it’s different. I think you have to hit a spec that actually means something in an ecosystem of televisions and games.”
Asked to guarantee that in three of four years there won’t be games that run on Scorpio but not Xbox One, Spencer said: “It’s not our plan, honestly. Our plan is that Scorpio is part of the Xbox One family and that the games will run on both systems.”
A plan isn’t quite the same as a guarantee.
Spencer also argued that keeping support for Xbox One will not hold back Scorpio, pointing to PC gaming as an example of how developers build scalable games.
“The fact that you also support Xbox One when you support Scorpio is really not that different to having a recommended spec and unbounded spec in the PC space,” he said.
A lot remains to be revealed about Xbox Scorpio, and with a Holiday 2017 release planned it’s likely we won’t begin to hear specifics until around E3 next year.
Source: Game Informer
