Microsoft has been in the spotlight since the beginning of 2016, with Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox coming out and declaring all kinds of things. Well most have been in favour of bringing PC gaming and Xbox closer and closer. All of a sudden, trying to make two communities that have been at each other for over a decade, come together is saying something. Maybe this is a strategy to promote Windows 10 or maybe to promote Xbox or maybe both, whatever the case may be, it is good for the gamers in general, but we do have our suspicions, which we will talk about later in the article. First let’s go through the events of which started way back in 2015.
It All Started With:
In January 2015, Microsoft had announced a gaming app (Xbox app) for windows allowing for cross-platform play and a combined list of friends across both platforms. In November 2015 another announcement was made that the Xbox One ran a modified version of Windows 10. As for the games,there were many smaller games like Sea of Thieves, Ashen etc which were coming to PC. Also the timed exclusive, Rise of The Tomb Raider hit the PC market earlier than expected while the PS4 release date doesn’t seem to budging. Also there were rumours surrounding some of the bigger games like ReCore coming to the PC. Many people suspected that Scalebound may be making it’s way to the PC due to the poor performance on the Xbox One on it’s gameplay reveal. Though 2015 did not see Microsoft release any Xbox Exclusive on the PC, we knew that there was something going on, but we were pretty much in the dark. One big move that we saw was Backwards Compatibility, which meant that you could play all your Xbox 360 games on your Xbox One. They have been increasing the number of games in this category pretty fast and many of the major games have already made it.
Then this Happened:
It is recently that we heard some of the biggest news in the past decade. ReCore, a game that was previously being developed for the Xbox One exclusively had been listed for PC as well. Some of the games that had been shown at the E3 2015, as Xbox exclusives had also turned the same route. And not much time had passed before the bomb was dropped, Quantum Break, one of the most anticipated exclusives of Xbox One for 2016, was making it’s way to the PC too. That was a very big move indeed.
After Quantum Break’s reveal very little doubt was left that Microsoft wasn’t in the PC gaming community for the small fish. They are going all out with whatever they have. But there is the small hitch that all these games would not be making it to Steam, and will only be available on the Windows Store. That hurts, because Steam is where the biggest PC Gaming community is and on top of that there was news that the Windows store had some very silly things which involved In-Game settings, like V-Sync to be always turned on and games running in borderless Window, which meant that performance and quality will get affected. But Microsoft came out and said that they would make sure that the PC community had no issues at the launch time.
And now we are at:
Recently Forza Horizon 6 was announced for PC in later 2016 known as Forza Horizon 6: Apex, which would not exactly be the full version of a the game but will contain the core essence and if this and the Quantum Break news weren’t big enough for you, then Phil Spencer had an ace up his sleeve. He recently proposed that Xbox will not be limited by the hardware any more. He hinted that the Xbox will be upgrade-able so that it can run all the games backward and forward. In an interview with Polygon, he said:
We look at these other ecosystems out there like mobile, tablet and PC and we see that they have a very continuous evolution cycle in hardware, whereas between console generations most of the evolution is making it cheaper and potentially making it smaller.
Both are meaningful but don’t make the games play any better. If you look at PC specifically and see the evolution that happens there, there’s no reason why console can’t ride that same curve.
I look at the ecosystem that a console sits in and I think that it should have the capability of more iteration on hardware capability. Sony is doing this with VR and adding VR capabilities mid-cycle to the PlayStation 4 and they are doing that by adding another box. I don’t mean that as a negative. But it’s not changing what the core console is about.
For consoles in general it’s more important now than it’s ever been, because you have so many of these other platforms that are around. It used to be that when you bought your console you were way ahead of the price performance curve by so much, relative to a PC. But now PCs are inexpensive and your phones are getting more and more capable.
I still think a console is the best price to performance deal that is out there but when you look at the evolution … I’m not going to announce our road map for hardware … but what I wanted to say on stage for people when they see this vision of ours and question our commitment to console I want to make sure that people see that what we are doing enables us to be more committed to what consoles are about than we’ve ever been and innovate more consistently than we ever have. That’s the key for me.
He clearly states that he wants the Xbox to be equivalent to a gaming PC.
Another big jump in the past week that we heard about was that Microsoft was planning to combine the ecosystem of both PC and Xbox running Universal Windows Applications. Meaning that all of Microsoft’s games would run on PCs.
What we could be looking at:
Many sites have stated that Microsoft is doing this to monetize on the PC gaming industry and it may as well be true. If we talk about general gamers’ problems, we think that using the Windows Store which is actually more of a Crap Store right now, is not a good thing with many limitations being placed on the PC power users. One reason of why they might be bringing these games to Windows Store can be that everything that happens on it can be monitored by Microsoft and if they give the games to Steam they may not have that amount of access. Also Microsoft has control over the store and if the games that are on the Windows Store sell very well, and the general opinion about the games are good, when the next generation comes they can remove everything from Windows Store, make the next-gen Xbox and say that all the games are Xbox Exclusive, so that the current users will favour Xbox over other consoles in it’s next iteration.
This is what we think Microsoft is trying to do. DO you agree with us or do you disagree? What do you think about the Exclusive turned In-exclusive games? Let us know that and more in the comments below.
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