Xbox One X: Microsoft on its vision for the new console

You are positioning the X very much as a premium product, do you expect more mainstream interest or are you focusing on the technophiles?

We started the project that lead to Xbox One X about four years ago in total, from an engineering perspective it’s been two to three years of working on it in earnest. When we were working on the project, the vision we had was we wanted to deliver a console without any compromises. So for people that had a 4K TV it would play in 4K. We believed we could work on technology that was also applicable on a 1080p TV to make it look better.

The second thing we decided was rather than this being a new generation per se, even though the level of technological innovation is of that ilk, we really wanted to offer choice for customers to say “what do I value, how much money am I willing to pay, how important is performance for me?” And then people can choose.

All the games will work across the product family. So we want to offer the choices including attractive value for somebody getting their first console and something for someone who wants the ultimate gaming experience on a console. The response thus far has been pretty good.

There is a lot of chatter on price, of course. Part of what we’re doing is reiterating that we want a family and we want choices but we don’t want to compromise, we want to deliver a level of performance that hasn’t been offered before. We think people are going to dig it, but they’re going to choose.

In a sense you are going up directly against the PS4 Pro, which is £100 cheaper. Obviously you can say the X is more powerful but how are you going to communicate the practical benefits to say it’s worth the extra money? Because it’s not an insignificant difference.

Certainly, yeah. There are very few things more important to people than what do they get for what they invest so that is something on our minds for everything we do. Not just the pricing of Xbox One X. What we intend to do is make sure everyone understands what the facts of what the choices are and to romance all the games you can play on them and that the experience is better.

We believe that we’ve got the best value with Xbox One S as it includes as 4K Blu-Ray player. In the case of Xbox One X we are introducing a level of gameplay quality that just hasn’t been seen.

It’s early so developers are going to take time between now and when it launches, they are going to work on it and tweak their games and people are going to see fantastic third-party support as well as from our first-party.

And then consumers will then decides, so whether you want the most value or the world’s most powerful console in either case we feel really good that or family gives you both options. 

How have you found the reception to your announcements?

 It has been great. There were two things we tried to do with our briefing. One was to show a really diverse line up of games. Everybody knows the big blockbusters that are playable across all the systems. We wanted to show a more eclectic set of games for every type of gamer.

And second was to introduce the Xbox One X and the next set of information for people about what’s coming. And not only that it will play all of these games, but it will play them best. So with both of those I think the reception has been nice!

It does seem that you had a more diverse lineup than usual rather than a parade of big blockbusters

It was a very intentional thing that we wanted to feature all the different type of games that people play. And not just feature the ones with the largest populations. We wanted a briefing that appealed to everybody so we were intentional about which things we decided to showcase. And it has been nice to see the variety of games that people have enjoyed.

Even this last year there has been indie developed games out of China like Candleman that can be really popular with people. Those kind of hidden gems can be some of the most fun things to share. And the reaction is always interesting to see what’s going to be a hit. We always have our bets coming in and it’s fun to see how everybody responds because there are things that are a surprise even to us.

It did feel you perhaps lacked that big-ticket blockbuster reveal. The only ‘triple-A’ game you announced was Forza Motorsport 7, did you not feel you needed one more big moment to help sell the X?

We feel really good about the lineup. It’s important for us to reiterate that the third-party games will play best on Xbox One X. But our focus on the briefing, because we only have so much time, was 'Hey listen we want to show this broad variety of games and Xbox One will set a new standard for console performance.' 

We have our Microsoft Studio teams working on stuff that’s a little further out that we think people will be excited by. And we wanted to focus on those two things - diverse lineup and best on Xbox One - including games that are coming in the next 12 months. So we are thinking near term: Sea of Thieves, Crackdown 3, State of Decay and the like. That’s where we decided to focus, but people can expect to see some really great stuff coming from our first party studios beyond this next 12 months for sure.

You didn’t mention virtual reality at all in the conference this time around. Is it something you are still invested in or have you taken a look at how the market has gone and thought ‘maybe not’?

As a company, Microsoft is very invested in VR. We’ve announced that there will be several Windows mixed reality headsets coming out later this year. From the Xbox perspective, we make the games for all of our devices and work with third-parties. We have several games in development for those mixed reality headsets and we’re working with third party developers for content.

Our focus is more on Windows PC based VR than on console. The opportunity is larger on PC in terms of the install base And we think the experience is a bit better. Right now the state of VR technology is really kind of tethered virtual reality headsets, so if you do that in a family room you’ve got wires mixed up in the coffee table and things like that. So that’s what lead us to say our focus is on PC-based VR rather than console so we’re not announcing anything at this moment.

There seems to be less of a focus on exclusives for Xbox, particularly with all of your first party titles going to PC too. It is something that gamers talk about a lot, but are you putting less of a priority on exclusives these days?

 The whole area of exclusives is interesting one because it’s many layered. There are traditional console exclusives, which are only playable on this system. Last year we decided with our first party lineup to make them available on not just Xbox One but Windows 10, so in that sense they are exclusive to Microsoft devices. There is also the notion of timed exclusives where a game is playable first on a particular system. We tried to be precise in the briefing as to which of those scenarios we were talking about. We’ve seen some good pick up on Play Anywhere titles or to the approach of making the content available on PC as well.

We’ve seen a good number of people that have played the games on multiple devices. They are some of the most engaged gamers we have and we’ve seen strong sales of our console still. We really look at it as providing the content exclusive to Microsoft devices as a good move. It gives gamers more options and if somebody decides they want to play a game on a PC or they want to play on an Xbox One or they want to play on both we want to facilitate that. The way consumer dynamics are working which is we’re all used to mixing and matching different devices, you know, which ecosystem of phone and so on.

 Minecraft is a great example, it’s a unique franchise and it’s been available across a number of platforms forever. So enabling people to play the game across these different devices and play with people regardless of what devices they’re on, we think it’s a more gamer centric way to operate. And some people may look at that as a weird business decision in some respect, but from our perspective we look at it as 'if we do right by gamers, they will do right by us’. More than half of gamers play games on multiple devices not just one. So facilitating scenarios of moving from one device to the next is extra value when you buy a game in our ecosystem. If we can unite larger communities of gamers to play together we think that’s good for the industry. Imagine if you had a black telephone

 It’s new and we have to explain it sometimes and we’re learning as we go. But I would come back and say all the games we showed yesterday there has been some good reaction to the lineup and 22 of them have some form of exclusivity, so gamers have tons of reasons to choose an Xbox One.