Phil Spencer has been making the rounds lately, dropping bits and pieces about the next generation Xbox, as well as some failing of the brand in the past. Now he’s talking about a little of the past, and a little of the future in the concept of cloud gaming. It’s something that’s coming, and whether it’ll be a major transformation for the industry, or little more than a very expensive bump in the road, remains to be seen. Whatever comes, one thing that Spencer does think is that it won’t be replacing our traditional console experiences anytime soon.
In an interview with GameSpot, Spencer said that he personally saw cloud gaming as inevitable for the future, but that it would be a long time before that experience would replace consoles. He said that the kind of thing xCloud caters to, convenience and ease of access, won’t necessarily overlap with the dedicated features and technical prowess of, for instance, the Xbox One X.
“In xCloud, we are building a convenience capability to allow you to take your Xbox experience with you,” he said. “Meaning, that’s why we focus on the phone, and the experience is not the same as running the games on an Xbox One X. I’m not going to say that it’s an 8k 120 hertz thing. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re going to bring convenience and choice to you on your phone.”
Spencer has already mentioned in the past that he sees the big boon of xCloud as reaching areas where dedicated consoles haven’t been able to penetrate. That will lead to trade offs with things like power, obviously. Whatever happens, though, it’ll be interesting to see where the future goes.
