If I start to highlight something else, both publicly and internally, it changes our focus. The primary outcome of all the work that we do is how many players we see, and how often they play. “I know it seems manipulative and I’ll apologise for that,” he says, “but I don’t want my team’s focus on. Spencer knows how many Xbox Ones were sold, but he sticks to his guns and won’t tell me. The company stopped even reporting sales numbers for the Xbox One years ago, but analysts have estimated that it sold less than half of the PlayStation 4’s 100m+ units. Given that 2013’s Xbox One was hugely outsold by the Sony PlayStation 4, it’s convenient for Microsoft to focus on subscriptions, attention and revenues rather than the number of consoles sold. “I think that diversity of business model is one of the key differences between what we’re trying to do and what happened in music, where everything shifted all at once.” “Hopefully, our focus supports all the models that are currently out there, from retail to free-to-play to subscriptions,” he says. Game Pass and cloud gaming are Xbox’s focus now, he says, but not to the exclusion of consoles – at least, not yet. View image in fullscreen The new Xbox XSX and XSS consoles. With Microsoft already clearly committed to this direction of travel, what will its effect be on the games industry? Subs and streaming have already transformed other creative industries, with varying effects on artists – Spotify has been a disaster for musicians, where Netflix has arguably been good news for TV producers. Under his leadership, Microsoft has massively broadened its stable of game developers, started selling Xbox games on PC, and engineered its own streaming service to let people play on any screen, known in prototype as Project xCloud. Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox since 2014, is known to players as the guy who shows up on stage at press conferences in video-game T-shirts. It’s been clear for a while that Microsoft sees the future of gaming in subscriptions, streaming and services. And Microsoft has spent the past five years spending billions on game developers to shore up its star service: Xbox Game Pass, a monthly subscription that lets you play hundreds of games for a monthly fee. Amazon and Google are both working on game streaming services that let people play cutting-edge games without paying for a box that sits under the TV. The looming Netflix-ification of video games threatens to upend the whole idea of video game consoles. But despite the usual competitive crowing about teraflops, frame rates and resolutions, there’s a different dimension to the console wars this time around. The launch of the Xbox Series X this week marked the start of a new video game console generation – historically a super-exciting time for players, as better technology unlocks new dimensions for games.
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