

“I want gaming to evolve to that same level.” I don’t know where you watch it, where I watch it, but we can have conversations about the shows we watch,” says Spencer. (Until 5G rolls out, cloud gaming will suffer from issues around bandwidth and latency.) But movies, television, and music are all becoming more and more device-agnostic. Sure, it may not be a perfect experience. They’re going to want to play Sea of Thieves on hardware they already own. As Xbox moves further into markets like Africa and India, Spencer theorizes that populations who typically enjoy entertainment on mobile devices and tablets aren’t going to buy a television and a gaming console to plug into the wall. The image of the mobile gamer is changing a lot as the years go on, too, from an idle mom poking away at Candy Crush to a dedicated teenager headshotting opponents in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Today, consoles aren’t the most popular way to play games phones are. “This world where the hardware you bought keeps us from being able to play together seems totally foreign in today’s world,” says Spencer, describing “walled gardens” as “such a 1990s construct.” (There’s arguably more in it for Xbox to want to tear down those boundaries for a lot of gamers, Sony’s plot of land has more appealing exclusive games.) Or you were an Xbox person and you lived in the walled garden next door. (Once, in 2017, when Sony accidentally turned on Fortnite cross-play between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Spencer tweeted, “I would have liked to see them leave it on.”) You were a PlayStation person and you meandered around their walled garden, where you played the games exclusive to the PlayStation console.

It was an early champion of cross-play-when gamers can play online games together across consoles-for games like Minecraft and Rocket League when Sony in many cases was not. “It’s no longer checkers.”įor years, Xbox has been chipping away at the historical borders delineating how we play games. “There’s this calculus, this chess match we’re playing,” says Spencer.

“In the long run, to me, it’s a question about the viability of the television,” said Spencer last week in an interview with WIRED. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, thinks whether consoles will exist in 10 years is the wrong question to ask.
Door dash promo codes 2017 series#
Despite its massive push for the Xbox Series X, Microsoft is hedging its bets that a decade from now more and more gamers will be taking a “no gods, no masters” approach to where and how they play. Yet at the dawn of a new era of consoles, it’s hard not to wonder whether these mega-powerful boxes we plant in our living rooms will even exist in 10 years.

It’s a vision Xbox itself is championing. As videogames follow that same path, the primacy of the specced-out console itself seems increasingly in doubt.Īfter all, tweens who play Fortnite already know that everything can be a console. While their hardware improvements are hard to argue with, they’re arriving in an unprecedented era of media consumption: Netflix on iPhones, Kindle on tablets, Spotify on PC, all three interchangeable on each piece of hardware. Microsoft and Sony will launch the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 later this year.
