14 DAY TRIAL // During this year's edition of the South by Southwest Gaming Expo, Spike TV's Geoff Keighley interviewed the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Game Studios, Phil Spencer, who shared his thoughts on various game-related topics and the past and the future of console gaming.
Spencer shared his viewpoint that competition in the console world was healthy, as long as it didn’t degenerate into an "unhealthy dislike" of all manner of competition, which was the unfortunate case with some owners of a particular brand of console that seemed to hate everything that was not related to it.
The "console wars" was so toxic and grew so notorious, that the conflict was also at the core of the plot of some South Park episodes.
Spencer revealed that the combined sales of both consoles showed an incredibly promising start for the next-generation of hardware, and that the competition between Microsoft and Sony would definitely pay out in the future, and those who would benefit from it the most would be the consumers, because they would see developers struggling to make better and better games on both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
He also talked about the importance of properly assessing the growing free-to-play model that is having a severe impact on gaming, with the advent of inexpensive mobile gaming platforms being a boon for such productions, citing Killer Instinct as an example.
Also reaching on the topic of bringing back older popular franchises, he pointed out to Killer Instinct's success story, mentioning the lessons he learned from the whole thing. They didn't try to make a hundred-million-dollar reboot of the game, instead offering gamers a re-take on a popular childhood franchise in tune with modern business models.
"I think it's important for us to go back and revisit where we came from, and I think for me it was just something that I didn't appreciate enough, and I'm kinda learning more about that," Spencer confessed.
He also pointed out to the importance of Kinect, explaining why it was included in the bundle with the Xbox One. According to him, the Kinect unlocks the potential for many innovative interactions and for skill-based gameplay, but the entire concept takes time to perfect, and as time goes by, that kind of gameplay will only improve until becoming commonplace.
The release of Kinect on Xbox 360 unlocked gaming for many people who look at traditional controllers as a kind of barrier, limiting the kind of experiences that can be derived from the console. The team behind the Xbox One focused on improving the fidelity of the device, on upgrading it just like they did with the console itself, as the increased precision of motion tracking can lead to a more complex integration of a whole new paradigm of game controls.