Far too long to post it all but a good read. Interesting interview with Phil Spencer at GamesCon for The Guardian UK
Xbox One's Phil Spencer: 'we're committed to the original vision' - Exclusive: We talk to Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Game Studios, at Gamescom about Xbox One's rocky road to launch
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/22/xbox-one-microsoft-gamescom-2013
"Yes. And the idea of being able to share digital games
We didn't reverse that.
But they're in the background now. I wonder how much of that proposition, which was very Steam-like, will come back?
We're committed to the digital ecosystem that we talked about at the beginning of Xbox One. Absolutely. That's why I wanted to be clear on what you were referring to with the word 'reversal'. Other people have tried to twist this a little bit, but it's important that we remain in a two-way dialogue with gamers and potential customers about what they would like to see. Consoles today are as much a service as they are an individual purchase our commitment through Xbox Live and updating the software and keeping the games coming is a long-term service commitment. The service gets better through direct feedback with the people who are using it.
What we heard from gamers is that they enjoyed the physical DRM they had with the 360 ecosystem and they wanted to add that to Xbox One. So we added physical DRM to the digital DRM plan that we had. When we did that, maths takes over and some things had to move out. But the core of that digital ecosystem is absolutely something that we believe in, and we haven't reversed it. You'll be able to buy games as physical and digital goods, you'll be able to share games with everybody in your house, and other features that we talked about will definitely be coming down the line.
There are plenty of pundits out there who say all console wars are won on price. You have the more expensive console because you've refused to remove Kinect from the equation. So how do you respond to those people?
I think it's always about experience in the end. I'm not discounting price at all, the economy is tough, and buying into the next generation, whether it's us or someone else, is not an insignificant amount of money. I get that. What I say is, we're committed to Xbox One in the long run we have a long roadmap of features, of games that we're going to bring and Kinect is critical. We've given Kinect to the biggest developers on the planet and they've integrated it in some very interesting ways; along with Smart Glass which has created some really compelling scenarios.
And now we're going to unlock those same creative capabilities in the independent developers. You may remember, when the original Kinect got into the hands of the Windows development community, there was this explosion of creativity. I've really been excited by the number of indies coming to me as part of ID@Xbox and telling me what they want to do with cloud and Kinect they can only rely on that if they know Kinect is a consistent part of the platform.
In a year's time do you think games will look fundamentally different from how they are now?
The part I'm really excited to see is the use of the cloud, and how that changes. Think back to when the Xbox 360 first came out with the blade interface, and look at it now well that's dramatically changed. Now we're putting hundreds of thousands of servers behind the capabilities of Xbox One which is going to allow game developers of all sizes to really think differently about how they deliver their products and their services, and frankly how we architect the platform as well. That union of the capability of the box and what's behind the box will mean we'll see an even more dramatic change in this generation than we did in the last, as the years go by.
Do you see a future that is purely digital?
Well I'm a big Steam fan; you talk about your phone, your tablet, those are all digital ecosystems it's not like, as consumers, digital ecosystems are foreign to us. But we heard from consumers that they wanted us to also support a physical system as well. So our plan was to continue to grab a lot of the advantages of a digital system while adding in physical. Now, there are some differences that you need to understand: in a digital world, we know which games are yours as you purchase them online, the license is associated with your account and that gives us unique capabilities in terms of what we can do with that content. When the DRM is on the disc, we don't know that you own that disc and so the capabilities are different. If you're a digital customer and you're comfortable with that, you should invest in being a digital customer on Xbox One, because those advantages will be coming, some at launch and some later. But we're giving you a choice. It's like movies: I happen to be more of a digital customer, through Netflix and pay-per-view, but you can still go and buy Blu-rays and DVDs.
It's weird because there are two stories that came out of E3: one that Sony won with its very aggressive press conference, and then another, where Xbox One took a huge number of E3 Games Awards Do you feel that one interpretation got overlooked in favour of the other?
I guess I just have a fundamental belief that gamers buy games consoles to play games, and they don't buy them for press events. We're going to lead with the content that we think gamers want and all of the people on stages, myself included, that's just part of a show. When you land it, the questions people ask are: what am I going to be able to play? What does this console do for me? What are my friends playing? What games are coming? And you know, we have Titanfall coming, we have Halo coming, we have our relationships around Fifa and Call of Duty, and our exclusive games. Those experiences, what the box is capable of in the end, that's what it is. All of this, this is for people who look inside the business. That's great, I love feedback and our ability to listen to the feedback and respond has to be a strength while building this platform, it has to be, I can't see it any other way."
Xbox One's Phil Spencer: 'we're committed to the original vision' - Exclusive: We talk to Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Game Studios, at Gamescom about Xbox One's rocky road to launch
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/22/xbox-one-microsoft-gamescom-2013
"Yes. And the idea of being able to share digital games
We didn't reverse that.
But they're in the background now. I wonder how much of that proposition, which was very Steam-like, will come back?
We're committed to the digital ecosystem that we talked about at the beginning of Xbox One. Absolutely. That's why I wanted to be clear on what you were referring to with the word 'reversal'. Other people have tried to twist this a little bit, but it's important that we remain in a two-way dialogue with gamers and potential customers about what they would like to see. Consoles today are as much a service as they are an individual purchase our commitment through Xbox Live and updating the software and keeping the games coming is a long-term service commitment. The service gets better through direct feedback with the people who are using it.
What we heard from gamers is that they enjoyed the physical DRM they had with the 360 ecosystem and they wanted to add that to Xbox One. So we added physical DRM to the digital DRM plan that we had. When we did that, maths takes over and some things had to move out. But the core of that digital ecosystem is absolutely something that we believe in, and we haven't reversed it. You'll be able to buy games as physical and digital goods, you'll be able to share games with everybody in your house, and other features that we talked about will definitely be coming down the line.
There are plenty of pundits out there who say all console wars are won on price. You have the more expensive console because you've refused to remove Kinect from the equation. So how do you respond to those people?
I think it's always about experience in the end. I'm not discounting price at all, the economy is tough, and buying into the next generation, whether it's us or someone else, is not an insignificant amount of money. I get that. What I say is, we're committed to Xbox One in the long run we have a long roadmap of features, of games that we're going to bring and Kinect is critical. We've given Kinect to the biggest developers on the planet and they've integrated it in some very interesting ways; along with Smart Glass which has created some really compelling scenarios.
And now we're going to unlock those same creative capabilities in the independent developers. You may remember, when the original Kinect got into the hands of the Windows development community, there was this explosion of creativity. I've really been excited by the number of indies coming to me as part of ID@Xbox and telling me what they want to do with cloud and Kinect they can only rely on that if they know Kinect is a consistent part of the platform.
In a year's time do you think games will look fundamentally different from how they are now?
The part I'm really excited to see is the use of the cloud, and how that changes. Think back to when the Xbox 360 first came out with the blade interface, and look at it now well that's dramatically changed. Now we're putting hundreds of thousands of servers behind the capabilities of Xbox One which is going to allow game developers of all sizes to really think differently about how they deliver their products and their services, and frankly how we architect the platform as well. That union of the capability of the box and what's behind the box will mean we'll see an even more dramatic change in this generation than we did in the last, as the years go by.
Do you see a future that is purely digital?
Well I'm a big Steam fan; you talk about your phone, your tablet, those are all digital ecosystems it's not like, as consumers, digital ecosystems are foreign to us. But we heard from consumers that they wanted us to also support a physical system as well. So our plan was to continue to grab a lot of the advantages of a digital system while adding in physical. Now, there are some differences that you need to understand: in a digital world, we know which games are yours as you purchase them online, the license is associated with your account and that gives us unique capabilities in terms of what we can do with that content. When the DRM is on the disc, we don't know that you own that disc and so the capabilities are different. If you're a digital customer and you're comfortable with that, you should invest in being a digital customer on Xbox One, because those advantages will be coming, some at launch and some later. But we're giving you a choice. It's like movies: I happen to be more of a digital customer, through Netflix and pay-per-view, but you can still go and buy Blu-rays and DVDs.
It's weird because there are two stories that came out of E3: one that Sony won with its very aggressive press conference, and then another, where Xbox One took a huge number of E3 Games Awards Do you feel that one interpretation got overlooked in favour of the other?
I guess I just have a fundamental belief that gamers buy games consoles to play games, and they don't buy them for press events. We're going to lead with the content that we think gamers want and all of the people on stages, myself included, that's just part of a show. When you land it, the questions people ask are: what am I going to be able to play? What does this console do for me? What are my friends playing? What games are coming? And you know, we have Titanfall coming, we have Halo coming, we have our relationships around Fifa and Call of Duty, and our exclusive games. Those experiences, what the box is capable of in the end, that's what it is. All of this, this is for people who look inside the business. That's great, I love feedback and our ability to listen to the feedback and respond has to be a strength while building this platform, it has to be, I can't see it any other way."
