Q&A: With Scorpio rising, Phil Spencer looks to the future of Xbox

[Leasy]

Super long interview not even going to post the entire discussion

Q&A: With Scorpio rising, Phil Spencer looks to the future of Xbox

I will however tag some interesting quotes

. "I was thinking about console generations being able to take on some of the advantages that PCs have. Without becoming PCs themselves."

.We saw 4K TVs coming, and we made a prediction that 4K TVs were going to be a thing during this generation. As opposed to when you think about original Xbox to 360, the SD to HD transition for TVs kinda happened basically as the generation happened. So it was nice because we could just kind of ride that and say okay, 360 is an HD console. OG Xbox is an SD console. Even though there were actually some progressive mode games on the original Xbox. Still, we could use that as a kind of clean cut.

.
So as we were looking at the development platform, we saw games that had a longevity in the market. Not just from people playing, but also frankly developers building new content and continuing to profit off of people playing those games. And we said okay, instead of I launch a game, somebody plays it for 30 days, and then that game kind of goes away out of the consciousness, other than just a memory, we're seeing these games actually continue to live. And people, developers and publishers, want to continue to service those games on our platform.

You know, Call of Duty is a great a example. Right now we've got a lot of people playing Infinite Warfare but we also have a lot of people playing Black Ops 3. And that's good for Activision. They can keep both of those ecosystems strong. And we want to help them do that.

So when we thought about our tools, I said okay, games are going to live longer than we're used to them living on our platform. Which means from the service capability and monetization standpoint, we've got to go build tools so that they can continue to give content and services and other things to the customers. Seeing games like Destiny get born this generation makes a ton of sense.

But also these games are going to probably start to span generations. You know if you think about like, Destiny 2 is coming this year -- I pick Destiny because I think I have 600 hours into the game. But you know, Destiny 2's gonna be one of these games that I expect five, six, seven years from now, people are still going to be playing that game. It's going to be a little bit like WoW. Which you know, whatever its been, 10 years later, 15 years later, millions of people play the game.

 

[Leasy]

Will you require Xbox devs to support Scorpio? Will you expect them to patch in some level of support?
I want to make sure I understand the word support. The games will run on Scorpio. Any hardware peripheral you have, any game, any app; it is part of the Xbox One family.

Even -- and I tease the hardware team about this, because I'm running takehome now, so I have Scorpio at home --- even when you set it on top of your One, it directly portmaps. Like, you literally plug power in, plug HDMI in, it's all exactly the same.

We want to make it as turnkey as possible, for an Xbox One customer. That person has bet on us. They bet on us this generation, and I want to make sure that we're delivering a product for them, in Scorpio, that kind of meets the expectations and the investment that they've made in us.

So the Xbox One games are going to run on Scorpio. And when you ship an Xbox One game two years from now, even if you don't look at Scorpio as something that you want to take advantage of, fine. That's up to you. We're not mandating that people go and do Scorpio-specific work.

The big triple-A studios, that hasn't been the issue. Most of them, with their PC targets, already have...they've already built the assets. And we've thought about this. This comes from our PC heritage. That we should build the dev tools we deliver, through Direct X and now Pix, and working with our middleware providers, so if you've got a 4K version of your game on PC, we want to make moving that, those assets and that capability over to Scorpio seamless for you. That hasn't been a problem, when we're going and talking with the third-party developers that have done this work.

It's helped us that about a year ago, we started shipping games on PC. So, we did Forza at 4K on PC. We did Gears at 4K on PC. We did some other games, without announcing everything.

We've been in this motion of shipping games at a higher resolution than the current-gen consoles were capable of for a while, and we've used those learnings in our first-party, mixing with our platform and our hardware teams, to say okay, what is it going to mean if big third-party publisher X is already doing the same thing? How will they move over? And frankly, that's what we're finding. That when we go talk to them about it, it hasn't been 'how do we get you to support it?' It's been 'of course we're going to do this, because we want our game to show well.'

And there's even been this dynamic of -- you remember when Red Dead hit 360 back compat, it sold. It really started to sell well. Because a game like that -- well, Red Dead is definitely one of those games everybody should play. And when developers see that they say okay, there can be a new beat for my game, when it comes out and it's running at a native 4K on Scorpio, it's going to bring a new set of interest in my game, that people want to go see it.

And they're not often having to go rebuild the assets, because like I said in most cases they already have the assets. It's just setting the you know, the one guy for two days -- and to be clear, it's not 'one guy for two days' with every project -- that kind of scenario. And we're seeing the games get up and running well on the platform very quickly. And I think it's nice, because even if the game has been out for a while, a higher-res version of the game will cause people to take interest again. Those who maybe passed on it the first time, or were just too busy at the time.

 

[O³ (O cubed)]

So you're basically playing upscaled 360 games