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Phil Spencer has stepped forwards to say that "gaming beyond generations" doesn’t mean a new Xbox One every two years.
He’s clarifying Microsoft’s new strategy after some confusion emerged in the wake of this years’ E3 presentation, where Micrsoft revealed the Xbox One S and talked at length about a higher-spec Project Scorpio that would move Microsoft away from the traditional console generation market.
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has sat down for an interview with Game Informer and sought to clarify Microsoft’s position.
"To be completely honest," said Spencer "I don’t know what the next console is past Scorpio. We’re thinking about it. We’re looking at consumer trends and what the right performance spec and price would be, and [asking ourselves], “Can we hit something that has a meaningful performance characteristic that a gamer would care about?”
"I don’t have this desire to every two years have a new console on the shelf; that’s not part of the console business model, and it doesn’t actually help us."
Responding to Game Informer’s suggestion that people bought consoles to avoid the stereotypical view of PC games, with an upgrade due every couple of years, Spencer responded: "I’m not trying to turn consoles into the graphics card market," he stressed, "where every so often Nvidia or AMD come out with a new card, and if I want a little bit more performance I’m going to go buy that new card. I think for consoles it’s different. I think you have to hit a spec that actually means something in an ecosystem of televisions and games."
