While Phil Spencer didn't attend Gamescom 2017 due to personal reasons, Microsoft still sent Mike Ybarra, Corporate Vice President of Xbox & Windows Gaming.
In an interview with VG247, Ybarra addressed the topic of whether Microsoft intends to keep pursuing a smartphone-like business model after Xbox One X or not.
In terms of where we go from here… the early questions that we’re asking ourselves back in Redmond now… it’ll all be based on kind of the feedback we get from gamers as to what they want. We’re seeing a lot of push for just innovation in multiplayer, the kind of thing we discussed before – how does this watch, plus these scenarios of people playing together no matter where they are, and how this all fits together. I really like some of the feeback we get there.
Certainly this is a big jump forward in terms of what the living room experience can deliver – the Tomb Raider release that they did last night I thought was a good example of… they said look, the absolute best version here hands-down is going to be on Xbox One X, and so I love what we’re doing there.
It seems like Microsoft could be open to pursuing either model, depending on the preference of Xbox fans.
Ybarra also commented on the likelihood of Microsoft integrating with technologies like NVIDIA GameStream or Steam streaming.
Well, we see on the feedback site, we see people vote up features like that. We always look at it, talk to partners about it – we really use the feedback to determine prioritization of where we should go and invest. All of the latest cloud technology that’s out – we’re looking at all of that. There’s nothing specific that we can talk about here, but we certainly look at all of those trends and look into how we can take advantage of them.
What would you like to see? Regular hardware refreshes every two or three years or a comeback to traditional console generations (five years on average)? Let us know below.
As a reminder, the Xbox One X will launch on November 7th for $499.
