Phil Spencer Says Xbox Will Be Merging With The PC Platform

This is exactly what is going to happen and what is implied in the Sub-Text.
It makes sense. Why would we lock ourself in a 5 years cycle? It never made sense actually. Someone buying an Xbox ( or a PC ) should always get the more for it's buck.To me, it's been the direction toward what MS is going and I applaud it.

Hopefully this won't mean less games. Like all those games there were "exclusive" to ps4/pc.

It's as we've been expecting for ages. Jeff's talk about this on the Bombcast makes it sound veerrrry shaky right now though. The Windows app store not being designed to house big budget titles resulting in a lot of weird limitations is truly Microsoft at its 'best'.

My only question is whether I will be able to play the new Gear of War, without already owning an Xbox. Or will I need to buy the game on the Xbox before I can play it on my PC?

This just isn't right. There will be at most probably an xbox every 2 or 3 years. There are hundreds of different GPUs and CPUs with similarly high numbers of driver versions on top of which we've got every OS tweak and other bit of hardware (even just simply how much RAM and clock speed). The permutations build up so quickly that possibly testing, even for a second, every game is impossible. nVidia are, by far, the largest company doing this sort of work via their driver testing farms (the output of that system is how they get the numbers for the GeForce Experience "optimise my AAA game" button that sets some default to roughly get a 50fps average performance).

There would be a few xboxes. Probably no more than there are now but rather than just being die shrinks and other slightly tweaks to the construction or looks, they would be differently performing. Few enough that it would be completely practical to test every configuration thoroughly with the game and optimise them for each platform. No graphics settings. You put in the game and it just works. Because it has settings in there for every current console and maybe even a few bits in there to support a hidden "ultra" setting that could be enabled on the N+1 console to the latest release (assuming that you wouldn't just have a resolution slider as the most you'd do for forward compatibility - so a game designed to work on both the 360 and XBOne might be 720p, 1080p and have support not yet usable for 4K that may get enabled by the next xbox).

It's... not really that radical an idea for consoles that have been upscaling their previous generation games on more than one occasion in the past. As long as you stick to roughly incremental changes to the DX API and stick to x86 cores that are at least as fast as the last generation then there is no real reason why games shouldn't just work on the next platform and have more incremental stages in performance which are encoded into a default setting for each console on the disc. That's not bringing PC gaming with choosing your personal settings from a list of many options and building a PC from the trillions upon trillions of different component choices: it's just making backwards and forwards compatibility a first-class function of consoles at the level of "devs should think about this". That's long overdue and my extensive collection of older games benefit greatly from things like PCSX2 being able to brute force a higher resolution - adding that to the things a developer considers is just smart design.

I started listening to the Bombcast... I feel like at this point they should stop covering Xbox/Microsoft news. The only part in their conversation about all this where they seemed interested was the Killer Instinct part... As a long time listener and fan of the show, I feel more and more let down by their attitude and conversations ( or lack of ) regarding MS related news and games. If you don't want to talk about something, just don't... I don't know...that whole segment of the show bummed me down.

To be this good takes... a sabbatical.

@dudeglove: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN6N4qbLwlY

@shivoa: What's the point of releasing an Xbox every 2-3 years with small incremental improvments? How does MS benefit? Why not wait 4 years and release a fully backwards compatible XB2.

I hear this and place it within the context of what's going at Microsoft in general. Microsoft is increasingly focused on things that support subscriptions on a software level and limiting their hardware endeavors to more "premium" items like what Apple puts out. The Xbone as console as an item on a business intelligence report probably looks like this huge investment that didn't meet projections even if it's profitable.

I imagine that we're going to see something where Xbox version numbers come to mean something like "Xbox software version 3 will work with these following certified generations of hardware " sort of how iOS 9 will work on multiple iPhone models.

This is great news for those who don't want an XB1 at least.. curious how this will all turn out in the end. I can think of a few ways this makes sense but there are just so many details and so few answers.

I think the idea that Nintendo and Sony go this route is far fetched, at best, but who knows. Stranger things have happened..

@thepanzini: What's the point of releasing a new iPad each year? Why not wait until they're radically faster and only release one every 4 years? Why release a new GPU generation each year (even if they're just sticking new numbers on minor tweaks to last year's cards) rather than waiting for something major (like a die shrink or totally new architecture) to make them much better?

You release a 2-3 year cadence of xbox consoles so that your console is always the ones where the Digital Foundry comparison says yours looks best. You do it to bake in this idea that you're not just buying a console 2 years into the lifecycle that'll have no more games in a few years, you're buying a platform that'll have games released for many years (and which you can upgrade through hardware in but aren't forced to). You do it to mean you have a current console with ok profit margins and a last console that's cheap to make and can catch the budget market. You do is so your install base is never reset down to zero but there are always millions of people buying each game, even on the first day of the new generation of the device.

Just think of this as making console generations with a fast turnaround. They released 3 different 360 exterior designs and more than that many interior rebuilds, they just lowered the power requirements and cost to assemble each time rather than making it run faster and get more RAM in there each time. This time they might go a different way but they'll be spending little more because those rebuilds come in even if it's cost-cutting. This way they can do less of those and a few more higher-spec premium editions that mean more than putting a bigger HDD in the box or bundling a peripheral no one will be talking about in 3 years.

Why would you release a new console only every 4 years? Because 4 years was a contracted lifecycle and MS only did that because they felt forced and it means the 360 was an 8-year console (now that is a long generation without a successor). Hell, maybe this new plan is to release a new console every 4 years, rather than a cadence of every decade. But release it with this incremental plan of attack so you get a shiny new generation but don't completely destroy the market for games for 2 years while you build up a new install base and have to deal with porting to last gen with completely different SDKs. Unify that, keep it all easier and keep it all within the xbox brand. They have to try something new, because the 360 is looking a lot like a 1-off fluke that only won out because Sony dropped the ball. To fight the PS5, MS can't just have another go at doing the same thing they've done every generation, because Sony know they can't make a $600 mistake again.

I actually bought (a heavily discounted) GTA San Andreas on the W10 store a few weeks back. It was a port of the mobile version and ... actually kinda works fine on PC, with controller support etc.

Browsing the store is an arse-ache, but then Steam's been releasing so much rubbish lately that it's starting to look like Kongregate.

The main strength of the games console is the fixed hardware it would take twice the price to get the same performce level from a PC, Android has far more variants than iOS and is far less efficent as a result.

The iPad is an apple to oranges comparison bought by different people for very different reasons the most used apps work on every iPad, sales have also been declining over the last three years people won't upgrade forever.

Most people don't care about the Digital Foundry comparision they only generated so many headline because MS had the more expensive console and were hell bent on saying otherwise the 360 never had this problem. An XB1.5 will not bake in the idea the XB1 won't have games in a few years no one has ever raised this, you'll create a situation where people will worry their Xbox won't play some games in the future. An XB1.5 will be a hard sell it will need to be noticeably better so people are compelled to upgrade but how much better can small improvement be, and at what cost you don't know how much R&D MS spent and how long it would take to recoup.

The fast turnaround didn't go so well for Sega. The 360 was cutting edge tech it was expensive to mass produce thats why it had so many internal iterations. The XB1 is going to be far more profitable than the 360 ever was dispite selling fewer units. A XB1 slim would be more sensible new hardware is very risky the OG Xbox nVidia cock-up the 360 RROD and XB1 launch, an XB1.5 could very easily be MS 32x. The $600 PS3 in Europe outsold the 360 despite releasing sixteen months later. MS need to generate alot more good will they cannot afford to drop the ball at all.

@nashvilleskyline: I see your point but I think it made a little bit of sense at one point when you could buy consoles that were significantly better value propositions in terms of price to performance, but both the Xbone and PS4 launched in a state where PC hardware was just miles ahead... I know I'm not being fair when I say that, because we're talking about WAY more expensive hardware, but yeah, hardware gets better every year and locking your console to a 7-year cycle seems crazy when you really start to think about it.

There's nothing crazy about locking your hardware down from a developer's viewpoint. PC development's a minefield, as we've seen with the varying degree of port quality.