Speaking with The Guardian, Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, shot down the notion that he’s trying to turn PC gamers into console gamers, or vice versa, with their new Xbox Play Anywhere feature, which offers Xbox One and PC versions of the same game for one price. Instead, Microsoft sees how healthy PC gaming is right now and how many of their users own play on both platforms, and they want to give everyone choice.
Spencer then continued by bringing up Sony – who has a huge lead over them in the PS4 vs Xbox One console race – saying that Microsoft’s Play Anywhere strategy has nothing to do with them:
Sony is doing incredibly well with the PS4 but they’re doing something fundamentally different from us. We’re not building a strategy in response to what they’re doing, we’re building a response to what I see customers and gamers asking us for.
PlayStation President Andrew House made a similar comment last month from Sony’s side of things, saying, “[…] we don’t see [Microsoft’s emphasis on PC/Xbox cross-play] as really effecting or prompting any change in our thought process or strategy. We have always tended to believe that a proprietary ecosystem offering a very well crafted unified client experience is the way to go, and that sort of remains our strategy.”
At the end of The Guardian interview, Spencer talked about how consoles seemed like they were dying five years ago. “Now, Sony’s doing incredibly well, we’ve sold more Xbox Ones than we sold 360s at this point in the generation, and Nintendo is getting ready to talk about NX,” he added. “You know, the console business is very, very healthy right now.”
[Source: The Guardian via GameSpot]
