The Xbox One X Was A Response To What Fans Want, Not To The Competition, Says Xbox Head Phil Spencer

Was the Xbox One X reactive? It certainly feels as though it has been designed and made in direct response to all the criticism and feedback that Microsoft got with the original Xbox One- from its design to its power, to even its relatively simpler name, everything about the console appears to be specifically designed to counter a criticism that the original system got.

So was it reactive? Speaking to Giant Bomb, Xbox head Phil Spencer said, ‘To some extent, a lot of what I try to do with Xbox and the team is reactive, because we’re taking feedback. I am pretty active in the social communities around gaming, my Twitter account, Xbox Live… I’m there, I’m not trying to hide behind things. And I get that feedback, and I take that feedback and do something with it, I guess that’s reactive, but I guess it’s reactive to what people are asking for.

“I will say that with the Xbox One X, I do remember from the original Xbox that there was the feeling around the brand that ‘this is a powerful console.’ And when we do our brand research even today, power is a word that pops up pretty frequently. And I wanted to make sure we were living up to the brand promise of what people were expecting from us. And when we were designing the Xbox One X, I didn’t know what the competition was doing. I didn’t know that there would be a console shipping until later, I didn’t know there would be one until it launched in 2016. So there wasn’t a direct competitive thing, I didn’t know.”

So I suppose it was reactive- it was just reacting to what fans wanted, rather than what the competition was doing. Which is, I suppose, a good way to go about things, too.