Spencer Committed To Supporting Both Xbox & PC

Phil Spencer, Head of Microsoft‘s Xbox Division and Microsoft Studios, was featured today in a long audio interview with The Inner Circle Podcast. Many interesting topics were raised, among which there was one which is particularly dear to PC gamers; Spencer has, in fact, vowed that Microsoft will now be committed in supporting both Xbox and PC (Windows) platforms for gaming.

I thought the Windows 10 announcement was good. We haven’t talked much about it yet, but I’ve said gaming on PC is incredibly important to me and I think incredibly important to this company.

We took gaming very seriously on Windows a while ago. As we were launching Xbox, we were kind of distributing what we were thinking about. I’m really committed to us getting back to supporting both Xbox, as much as we ever had, and also PC, because I know that my friends and customers out there who are great gamers on Xbox, a lot of them are also great gamers on PC, and I want to make sure that we’re able to offer them the best experience across all the platforms.

He also offered an interesting opinion on the fragmentation of online identities over multiple gaming devices.

I see people playing games in many different places, whether it’s playing PC, the consoles, people playing on their smartphones, people playing on their laptop…We put a lot of time and effort into LIVE and I think of Xbox One as the way people play great games on their television, and I want to make sure that the television experience is great. But we know that people also play games in different places, and today when you’re playing on all those different devices it feels very disconnected, it doesn’t really know who I am, it doesn’t know who my friends are, it doesn’t know what podcast I should be listening to, I’m kind of a different person on every one of the devices with a different set of games, achievements, friends, leaderboards etc.

I love the fact that we have so many people playing games today, from simple games like Candy Crush all the way to the most hardcore games out there. I think it’s a good time to be in the games industry and I want us, as games industry, to embrace that breadth. In the future, I hope that it’s less “gaming by device” and more something where people are playing and are connected with their friends regardless of the device they’re on.

I can definitely agree with this. I’d love to have a unified profile, but it seems like a pipe dream for the moment being. Let’s hope that someone comes up with a solution soon.