Phil Spencer is a good man, and he is sporting about the competition. This, at least, is well known, and also well accepted at this point. So of course, when he reiterates to his followers on Twitter that he doesn’t look at gaming as a race, you gain more respect for the man standing by his convictions even as the head of one of the major gaming brands.
Speaking on Twitter, Spencer stressed that he doesn’t view gaming as race between platforms, and he does not view games as ‘weapons’ in a war. He is just concerned with making Xbox One and Windows 10 the best gaming platforms that he can. Gaming, he said, is bigger than a two console battle, referring to the competition between Xbox and PlayStation.
But he didn’t just not acknowledge Nintendo, either. He admitted that he loves what Nintendo does with its hardware, and he likes that Nintendo does not abide by conventions. Nintendo is good for the industry, he said.
That said, Spencer also says that Xbox did not enter the gaming portable market because they felt smartphones would take most of that market for themselves. While that may be true, collective, the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita have still sold 80 million units- not a number to sneeze at.
But Spencer was probably also bound by the larger direction that Microsoft was taking at the time. He is doing the best he can with what he has. We can at least laud the man’s efforts, and hope he truly does make Xbox the best place to play, as he wishes to. Healthy competition will be good for the industry.