Looking to their future, and perhaps realizing the future of gaming overall, the executive VP of Gaming at Microsoft is looking at a new direction. Phil Spencer mentioned in a recent interview that he’s looking at bringing in game studios that can build on multiple devices.
Spencer was a part of a Q&A session at the Barclays Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications conference. He said that the way people consume games is starting to expand more than beyond just one device, so he’s looking for game developers who could work with more than just one device.
“Cloud is the way we can deliver community and content to a player on any device,” he said. “Yes, I’d say I’d hesitate to look for a game studio that’s only capable of building on one device because gamers play games on all devices, and I think you’re missing out on an opportunity if you’re not thinking about games that can work everywhere players show up.”
Microsoft is starting to get its feet wet when it comes to cloud based gaming. Project xCloud will be its answer, set to launch sometime next year. Spencer mentioned that their goal is to first focus on Android devices.
“We focus first on Android phones, because there are 1 billion Android phones on the planet and it’s a place with the content that we’ve natively built up over the past decades on our platform,” he said. “But, we look at cloud streaming as a way over the years where we’re able to bring content to customers on any device that they have, regardless of the local compute capabilities.”
The company has worked hard over the last year to bring a number of new development studios under its fold. Developers such as Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, Obsidian Entertainment and The Initiative have all been purchased by Microsoft in the last year. They join other high profile development teams such as Rare and Microsoft’s own development team.
Public trials for Project xCloud are set to begin next year.
