Spencer understands that tough decisions led to Xbox One

Oct 24, 2014 11:10 GMT  ·  By

Phil Spencer, the recently appointed boss of all things Xbox at Microsoft, confirms that he isn't ashamed of the Xbox One hardware, which has been proven to be inferior to that of the PS4, saying that the future of the platform is still a great one.

The Xbox One launched last November in several countries around the world and it immediately became clear that the components used by Microsoft weren't on the same par as those in Sony's PS4. From the slower memory to the less powerful GPU, many things led to games that performed better on the PS4 than on the Xbox One.

Spencer understands the tough decisions that led to the Xbox One

Even so, Xbox boss Phil Spencer, which was put in charge of that division at the beginning of the year, well after the Xbox One began its retail struggle, emphasizes to IGN, via DualShockers, that the design process for the console was a complex one.

According to the executive, it would be easy for him to say that, if he was in charge of the console's design, he'd push for better components and other upgrades that look obvious in hindsight.

"I know the people that make those decisions and I don’t know the realities of the situations when they made those decisions, so it’s easy to me to sit back now and say 'ok, we would have built a three teraflops box and sold it for 99 dollars' but I don’t know," he explains.

The Xbox One is still a good piece of hardware

Spencer emphasizes that, right now, Microsoft is trying to give developers as much power as possible via the Xbox One and that it's still a pretty good piece of hardware, considering it had practically no faults at launch.

"I will say that the work at the platform team is done to give as much power in the hands of the developers as we can. It has made a tremendous impact in the last six months, and I’m really proud of that," he explains.

"And the box, from a reliability standpoint, I mean I lived through red rings on 360 and other things, has been significantly better than we were at the launch of 360 which has been great. I’m not ashamed of the hardware that we have."

Spencer concludes by saying that the Xbox One has a great future based not just on the hardware, but also on the services and the different facets of the platform. As such, customers shouldn't be reticent about investing in the home console.