Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer was featured in several interviews this week. Firstly, he joined Fallout TV creator Jonathan Nolan on a panel at the Paley International Council Summit. During the conversation, the head of the Microsoft Gaming division said not having a new Fallout game ready for the show’s launch was actually beneficial.
The executive then stopped by Bloomberg’s New York City office for another interview. As reported yesterday, he revealed there is effectively no limit to porting Xbox games to other consoles following the launches of Pentiment, Grounded, Sea of Thieves, and Hi-Fi Rush, and the announcement of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. He also confirmed the existence of an Xbox handheld project (which, however, will take years to complete) and suggested more acquisitions might be possible, especially if it is an Asian developer.
In the same Bloomberg interview, Spencer gave a subtle dig at Sony’s controversial pricing of the new PlayStation 5 Pro console, saying the market won’t grow with consoles that cost $1K.
I feel pretty good about where this industry is going. To reach new players, we need to be creative and adaptive of new business models, new devices, new ways of access. We’re not going to grow the market with $1,000 consoles.
The basic PS5 Pro costs $699, but if you add the optional vertical stand and the disc drive, the price increases to over $800. That’s twice as much as the launch price of the PlayStation 4 Pro, Sony’s previous mid-generation console refresh. The PS4 Pro included a disc drive (but not a vertical stand).
Microsoft hasn’t mentioned anything about a mid-generation console refresh for the Xbox Series S|X. They did it for the Xbox One, of course; the Xbox One X launched a year after PS4 Pro, offering far better hardware at a slightly higher price ($499). Microsoft probably calculated that due to the rising manufacturing costs, it would have to offer a console with similar, if not even higher, pricing than the PS5 Pro and decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to launch such a console on the market.
Besides, Microsoft isn’t really focused that much on consoles anymore. While they promised a next-generation console delivering the biggest leap ever (likely with the help of machine learning), their real approach is fully multiplatform, as evidenced by the push on cloud and other consoles.
