To symbolize this commitment to players, Spencer and the leadership team at Xbox keep an empty chair at the leadership table to represent the customer. Spencer admits it's a bit corny, but it's a constant reminder to the leadership team who they're working for and what they want. "The gamers don't buy things because we need them to buy it; they don't do things because we need them to go do them," he says. "They do things because it matches what they need, and sometimes, frankly, what gamers want in the near term isn't always the best business decision for us. But being inside Microsoft, I think because it's a big company, we take a long-term perspective on things."
"[They've] all given their stamp of approval for their games to play with Project xCloud," general manager of Project xCloud Catherine Gluckstein says. "It takes hardly any time at all – I think somewhere less than 30 minutes – to get a game live."
However, the team knows that eliminating latency in a cloud streaming service isn't a possibility at this point in the tech's lifespan. "What we've found is that consistency of latency is actually much more important than the absence of latency," corporate vice president of Project xCloud Kareem Choudhry says. "We're doing a lot of work to make sure it's consistent as possible.
"Our real strategy here is what it means to be in the Xbox community," head of Xbox Phil Spencer says. "It means I want to be able to log into Xbox Live, I want to have access to Game Pass in a store, I want to have access to our great first-party portfolio. I'd say that's our strategy. And it's true: There have been certain things that have shown up on other platforms, but I wouldn't say those things are strategic. I think those are kind of opportunistic or partner-led."
Despite the optimism surrounding the technology, Spencer acknowledges that it's still years of community feedback from maturation, and that it still falls short of the experience players get when their game is local. "The best place to play is locally; I'll say that flat-out," he says. "Streaming is a technology of convenience. It's a technology of choice when you're away from your console and you want to play."
We've yet to learn anything about what The Initiative has been working on since its founding in 2018, but Booty tells me we'll learn more over the next 12 months.
"Sure, we could do publishing relationships there, and we might do that; I think that's fine. In fact, I would suspect we will do some of those," Spencer says. "But I also think as we continue to evolve our platform, having a first-party studio voice at the table that is from Asia, whether it's Japan or another market, would be a good add for us."
"I think a lot of our learning played out during the generation as we were listening to fans and customers on what we needed to evolve," he says. "I love the fact that now this team gets to create a platform that is kind of uniquely ours to go create. Because many people on the Xbox leadership team today kind of inherited this platform, and I think they've done a great job. But [Series X] is the platform that this team can go create. I'm incredibly encouraged by the work."
Forward Facing
Microsoft used this generation to get itself ready for the next one.
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