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The Xbox Series X doesn’t have exclusive titles when it launches later this year, because gaming isn’t only about who’s playing what on which hardware (via VG247).
Xbox boss Phil Spencer explained what that means in an interview with Gamertag Radio. “One of the benefits that we have sitting inside of Microsoft is we’ve obviously been close to the development of what’s been going on with PC for years,” said Spencer. “I think today, if we look at the PC ecosystem, we see some of the best, highest fidelity games anywhere sitting on high end gaming PCs, and some of those same games you’re able to run on PCs that are a few years old that have much less capability. And the state of engines and capability today means that developers have the capability to make full use of the gaming hardware that’s in front of them.” The priority of the Xbox Series X is “putting the player at the centre and not putting the device at the centre” of the experience.
“Obviously we built our strategy with Series X, we started with that in mind – we wanted to go build a gaming console that was going to be the absolute best that we could deliver on a television, and deliver unique capability to creators that they could use to go create the best games,” he added. “But you don’t want to do that to the exclusion of everybody else and you also want to do that hand-in-hand with developers because developers want to find the widest audience possible. Though there are “always trade offs” no matter the moves a company makes to stand apart from its competition, Spencer believes that this one is in the best interest of the player.
“I’m not gonna dictate to every third-party studio what they have to support, but what we see in today’s world is that gamers want to go and play games with their friends regardless of what device those friends are on, people want to have the largest selection of games open to them, and developers want to make use of the best technology that’s available,” he concluded. “We built this plan with all three of those as inputs and we feel really good about where we are.”
The Xbox Series X will launch in the holiday season of 2020. Halo Infinite is the first game confirmed to be launching with it, and “continues the Halo 5: Guardians storyline and takes the franchise in ambitious, unexpected directions.”
