Xbox boss Phil Spencer has explained that the company’s focus is on attracting “younger audiences”.
Over the past few months, Spencer has spoken at length about making Xbox-exclusive games available on “rival” platforms. Last weekend, while at the Game Developers Conference he spoke to Polygon about the possibility of an Xbox handheld console as well as having digital storefronts like Itch.io and the Epic Games Store available on Xbox, alongside their own store.
“This notion that Xbox can only be this one device that plugs into a television isn’t something we see in the Gen Z research because nothing else is like that for them,” he explained.
“Some of them will have an iPhone, some will have an Android, but all the games and everything is the same [for both of them]. All of their stuff is available wherever they want,” he continued. “So for Xbox, our brand pivot — as we attract and maintain relevance with a younger audience — is ‘Xbox is a place where I can find the great games I want to.’”
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He went on to say the console experience for many players is “sharded” due to the lack of cross-play with many games. “If I want to play on a gaming PC, then I feel like I’m [part of] a more continuous gaming ecosystem.”
According to Spencer, Xbox is currently considering “different hardware form factors and things that [they] could go do” and asking the question: “What should we build that will find new players [and] that will allow people to play at times when they couldn’t go play [in the past]?”
Over the past few weeks Xbox has released a handful of previously-exclusive games, including Obsidian Entertainment‘s Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush, on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles as an “experiment”.
“I’m going to learn about our partnership with other platforms. I’m going to learn about what happens with our players. I think it will benefit the games that we’re putting there [but] if the net result is that other things are punitive to the Xbox platform and limit our growth, then we’ll have to think more carefully about how we support these other platforms,” Spencer said at the time.
Earlier this month, former CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment and PlayStation worldwide Shawn Layden spoke about how exclusivity will always be “important” but is also the “Achilles’ heel” of many studios due to increasing production costs.