We spoke to the Xbox Corporate Vice President about the company’s new console.
Microsoft has had a very busy showing at this year’s E3. As well as unveiling its new 4K console, the Xbox One X, the company also managed to find the time to announce that the original Xbox’s games would be coming to the Xbox One as backwards compatible titles.
The two announcements nicely bookend the company’s split focus on both software and hardware. At the show this year Xbox seems to have managed to balance the two better than most, with a lineup that’s pushed its console hardware forward while giving gamers enough past and present games to keep them excited.
We sat down with Mike Ybarra, Xbox’s Corporate Vice President, at the show to find out where the announcement of the Xbox One X leaves PC gaming, how the company feels about backwards compatibility, and what the future holds for console gaming.
If you’ re a high-end gamer and you want the absolute best experience possible there’s no place you’ ll find a better performance to price ratio than Xbox One X. True 4K, all the features you saw in the briefing at $499, that value proposition is great.
So I’ d ask you what kind of gamer are you, where do you want to go on that spectrum?
If you’ re on PC you’ re going to be about $1500 or so, so that’s another area. We love Windows gaming. A lot of our games, almost 20 of them in the show, are going to be on Windows too.
So that’s the point that I love to say, ‘What kind of gamer are you?’ and let you decide what’s best for you.
I would say our goal isn’ t for anything to replace that. Our goal is to look at gamers in the broadest sense and say ‘what products can we offer that will get everyone into Xbox?’
Right now we are the industry standard, HDR10, and if Dolby is something the customers are asking for then we’ ll look at it just like any other feature.
That was really a goal we had to go to because we didn’ t want people to say, ‘Oh I need a 4K TV in order to get these advantages.’ You don’ t at all. It looks incredible with a 1080p TV.
We’ ll look at those original games and we’ ll listen to feedback on the feedback site. People are passionate about which games they want, and I bet that site is full of original requests now. We’ ll look at that, that’ ll be one part of the process we have, and as games are available we’ ll release them.
Another channel is that fans, of course, vote.
The last one is that developers come to us and say, ‘We want this game out’ because the more people they get playing their IP the better.
Usually, especially if there are sequels or more games like that coming, they do this to introduce people to that IP for the first time that may have only joined the Xbox community recently.
So it’s a mix of all of those and I think the prioritisation is different for different sets of titles, but a lot goes into what games we pick and how we release them.
Some titles have licensing restrictions on music from a long time ago that doesn’ t let it get re-released…so we’ ve got to go check all of that as well, and then technically we make sure it works and it’s the experience that the customer expects if not better.
On Xbox One X a lot of those even original and Xbox 360 games will run better on that platform, and that goes into consideration as well.
For me, when I promise a consumer a backwards compatable game I want to give them everything, and so we certainly would encourage them to give them the full experience. If you can’ t then that becomes a scenario that they have to make the choice on.
Going forward I can’ t tell what the future’s going to look like. I can say now that that’s our commitment and we’ re working hard to deliver that. There were so many fans that wanted original backwards compatibility the second we announced 360.
So Phil Spencer comes to my office and says, ‘We need this,’ but I was like, ‘You know how hard this is right?!’ There’s math and physics and challenges in doing it, and I would say our strategy is definitely that.
It’s the same with Xbox One X. We’ ve been meeting with developers, you heard EA on our stage saying they’ re going to optimize this because they want to show consumers the most amazing version of their games, and the Xbox One X is going to deliver that for them. We see that now.
When you’ re on PC there’s that abstraction layer. Even with the GPU manufacturer add-ons there’s still an abstraction layer there that pays a tax on performance. With fixed hardware on a console we can get every single ounce of that out and into a game’s hands.
