Hockeymac18
Member
GameSpot did a recent interview with Phil Spencer at the Australia EB Expo: Gamespot: Xbox Head Phil Spencer Talks Scorpio, PS4 Pro, 4K Resolution, and More
A few quotes that I found interesting:
On their decision to release Scorpio in 2017 vs 2016:
On pricing of Scorpio:
On console wars and their recent tone:
On different kind of gaming interactions (1 vs. 100 call out!!):
Lots more discussion in the interview (and it's a great interview, worth the read), including Phil's feelings on:
I didn't see a thread on this, and thought it was an interesting interview. Nothing too new, but still interesting discussion.
Please turn me into a checked list and tweet if old.
A few quotes that I found interesting:
On their decision to release Scorpio in 2017 vs 2016:
GameSpot: Sony recently announced the PS4 Pro. What was initial your reaction to the announcement? It's coming out a year before Xbox Scorpio; how does that affect your plans, if at all?
Spencer: It didn't affect our plan at all. About two and a half years ago we started to look at a hardware refresh that we might want to do, which in the end led to the Xbox One S and Scorpio in terms of designs. We'd looked at doing something that was higher performance this year, and I'd say the [PS4] Pro is about what we thought--with the GPU, CPU, memory that was here this year--that you could go do, and we decided that we wanted to do something different. So we looked at Scorpio and 4K and what I thought was a bigger step in terms of performance. It was something that we wanted to focus on.
On pricing of Scorpio:
We're not announcing price here. I guess I'd just say we announced the Xbox One S and it's out in market at $399 [in Australia]. We expect both of these products to be in market at the same time, and that there's a clear performance difference and obviously there will be a price difference between the two things. But I also want people to understand that Scorpio is going to be a premium console. Like, I'm not trying to sell you a high-end gaming PC rig for a couple of thousand dollars or something. We look at consumer price points of consoles and definitely our target is to hit that. But it will be a premium version of an Xbox One and we'll talk more about pricing as we're cutting it closer to the launch and everything else. But I'm confident that we'll be able to deliver a product at a price point that gamers will feel like is worth it.
On console wars and their recent tone:
GameSpot: After Sony announced PS4 Pro, the Xbox social media channels jabbed at the console's lack of a 4K Blu-ray player. Does this erase some of the goodwill you were trying to build up by being anti-console war?
Spencer: I am of two minds on this one. We have a 4K UHD blu-ray drive in our Xbox One S. I think us stating a feature that we have in our box that we think is an important selling feature of our box is completely within fair game. It is a feature of our box and for somebody to look and say that talking about the features that you decide… I mean, we made a bet on a 4K blu-ray disc, and they didn't. And I'm not saying they made the wrong decision and we made the right decision, but if somebody wants a 4K UHD blu-ray drive we have a console that has one, then we're going to make sure that people know that. And if people say that that's console wars, I think they're wrong.
We should be able to talk about the features that are in our box, but I also want to be respectful of what other companies are doing. And I don't think we crossed the line there, but as it was going on I also made sure that we remain respectful. Confident, but respectful of what other people are doing. But I don't want anybody to ever try to put us in a box of, "Hey, you've got a feature but because somebody else doesn't have it you can't talk about it," and somehow that's unfair and console wars-like. Because I don't believe that. I will always be respectful of my friends at the other platform holders; Nintendo, Sony. I have a lot of friends at Sony and Nintendo and both those companies are doing their best to deliver products based on their vision and I respect that. We're doing the same. You won't see me bad-mouth what the other platforms are doing but I am proud of the product decisions that we make and I think that we should be able to talk about it.
GameSpot: Social media is a funny thing. I think gamers like to see that sort of banter go down.
Spencer: And I don't. I've been vocal about that as well. I'll turn it around now. Like, when ReCore came out and there were some of the lower scores that were given, I would have PlayStation fans tweet me, happy that ReCore wasn't getting great review scores from some outlets. I just thought it was such a negative thing for our industry for somebody to be gleeful that somebody gave a game a review that was lower than what the team expected...
On different kind of gaming interactions (1 vs. 100 call out!!):
GameSpot: Do you mean like games where the streamers controller what's happening? For example, Twitch plays Pokemon.
Spencer: Or maybe even the other way around, because you might say that was the stream viewers controlling what the streamer [can do]… we're seeing that with Beam already. Not to make this an ad for Beam but because of the low latency, we can have streamers that are actually setting up an Xbox controller and the community can actually hit the buttons on the Xbox controller in real time and play a game like Killer Instinct, which I think is fantastic. And that's taking a game that was never built thinking that that's what would happen.
...
We did a game a few years ago called 1 vs. 100... and it was an avatar-based game show that you played real-time online. It was kind of a trivia game. But I think about now, and we could do it in a very non-interactive way because it was questions that you answered because we didn't have streaming and the capabilities that we have now. But I think you're going to see game genres get build up around the social connection that I think will be just really, really cool.
Lots more discussion in the interview (and it's a great interview, worth the read), including Phil's feelings on:
- Scorpio development,
- 4K gaming on Scorpio,
- Recore's release and some of the reception to it (partly covered in this GAF thread),
- the "Play Anywhere" campaign,
- exciting recent Industry trends,
- mobile gaming and where Xbox fits into it,
- Kinect's current place in Xbox.
I didn't see a thread on this, and thought it was an interesting interview. Nothing too new, but still interesting discussion.
Please turn me into a checked list and tweet if old.