In the most recent Xbox Podcast, Xbox VP of next-gen Jason Ronald, and VP of Xbox experiences Jason Beaumont offered fans a peek into the future of Xbox cloud features, hardware, and more. As many avid Xbox gamers are already keenly aware, Microsoft is currently undergoing a bit of a major transformation in terms of their partnerships, consoles, online services, and so much more. The Jasons shared quite a fair deal of exciting information that I’ll do my best to summarize for you as we go!
Microsoft are dipping their toes into the growing world of VR gaming with the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition, exploring the mobile gaming space with the upcoming ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X, continuing their partnership with AMD to work on producing their highest quality home console to date, all while cleaning up the Xbox digital storefront by putting new policies and features into place for everything from banning bundle spamming to making the game library easier to navigate with new tools.
While all of this seems to be a positive trend for the gaming titan, the transformation hasn’t come without its shortfalls and unfortunate outcomes, with many studios, departments, and executive positions being restructured or entirely eliminated to better direct the focus of their employees on the future of the company. With all of that said, Xbox first-party content has completely overshadowed the revenue stream from third-party titles and Xbox Game Pass is building a much larger community of gamers that are willing to invest their time and money into day one releases and trying out games that they may otherwise have not given a fair shake.
Microsoft’ has been opening up its software to a broader audience as well, through sharing once-exclusive series’ like Halo and Gears of War with PlayStation, putting to bed the ridiculous notions of “console wars” that stopped being fun to joke about 15 years ago. PlayStation repaid these actions in kind by providing Helldivers 2 (which was previously only available on PS5 and PC) to the Xbox fan base on August 26th, the same day that Gears of War Reloaded (the re-remaster of the legendary GOW franchise) is coming to PS5 players with cross-platform support so everyone can get in on the fun! They’re even adding a Halo ODST update to Helldivers 2.
Ronald and Beaumont chatted with Ethan Rothamel of Xbox’s social team to discuss the future of the brand as it currently stands.
“It’s the hardest I’ve ever seen the team working, there’s just so much going on,” said Jason Beaumont. “On the console, a lot of what we’re working on is under the hood. When we release something that’s for PC or for cloud gaming, or for mobile, we want that feature to go everywhere. So that’s a lot of the investments we’re making. Jason mentioned the Xbox Ally and the Xbox Ally X. We’ve been working gangbusters to get that released in time for this holiday.”
Jason Ronald added:
“When we think about the future of the Xbox, we think about how we put the player at the center of the experience. The vast majority of players play across multiple devices.”
“There’s a bunch of games I would start playing on the Xbox Ally, and now I want the full fidelity on my console on my big-screen TV. We’re focusing on how we evolve the Xbox ecosystem to allow players to play the games wherever they want to play them.”
He made it a point to emphasize that Microsoft wants to continue building devices dedicated to gaming, including the next-generation home console. The two Jasons also highlighted many of the recent inclusions to Xbox PC, including storefront aggregation and a unified library between devices. During the conversation, the team discussed quite a bit about Xbox’s Cloud Gaming initiative and its role in upcoming projects. Beaumont indicated that they will be expanding its reach to meet the incoming demand from gamers worldwide:
“You’re going to see us continue to invest in this area. This includes adding new [cloud] servers to meet the growing demand. We’re also exploring innovative ways to reach more players wherever they are. Our goal is really simple; we want to bring more games to more people. Cloud is great at that. We want to expand Xbox Cloud Gaming to more countries around the world, so people can play games they love no matter where they are.”
Ronald added:
“One of the things that we see is that there’s a lot of players who use Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to access the cloud. Whether it’s the primary way, or additional way to play when you’re on the go. I think for us, it opens up the opportunity to make it more affordable and make it more accessible to more players. Whether that’s new regions, or new ways to access [Xbox] cloud.”
“We want to add more value for our most dedicated players. Whether that’s things like adding new first or third-party day-and-date titles, the ability to stream your own games, or even things like adding new free-to-play game benefits. We want to add as much value as we can.”
Beaumont went on to point out the rapid growth of Xbox Play Anywhere as well, sharing that Xbox transactions are growing by “double digits,” even outside of Game Pass.
“We’re seeing a strong alignment with developers, for titles that support Xbox Play Anywhere, they’re seeing more play, because the game is available on many more screens. When I think about Xbox Game Pass, we had record Game Pass revenue, and we had our all-time high in Xbox Game Pass payouts to developers.”
“In addition, we’re also seeing double digit growth in both first and third-party transactions as well. So whether your game is in Game Pass or not, there are many more opportunities for developers to reach players within our community.”
The team switched focus a bit towards the next-generation Xbox console which is currently in development with Microsoft’s partners at AMD. Ronald hinted at some new AI-powered rendering techniques and the goal of bringing together all storefronts like GOG, Steam, and Xbox, all to one seamless location.
“Xbox and AMD have had a decades-long partnership, innovating in driving the next-generation in gaming. We’re excited to continue that relationship as we look forward to the future of Xbox.”
“We’re deeply focused on hardware and silicon innovation and how we can push the boundaries beyond the current generation of devices. This is grounded in the work we’re doing to build a unified platform across devices in new ways. It’s about ensuring gameplay is not locked to an individual device or storefront. We built our libraries across a whole set of different services; we want to put that experience front-and-center.”
“Together with AMD we’re developing dedicated silicon to power the next generation of gaming experiences. We’re developing next generation rendering technologies, including neural rendering. It’s about deepening the immersion. We’re investing in dedicated silicon to develop the next generation of AI experiences, which will be transformative in how you experience gameplay.”
“It also provides a new surface that developers can take advantage of, delivering new kinds of experiences that they weren’t able to deliver before. All of this starts this year with the Xbox Ally X, because it has a dedicated NPU that allows us to experiment with some AI-powered experiences before we get to our next-generation console.”
“This reminds me a lot of the early days of the original Xbox. We had a vision of where the Xbox console could go. We had this notion of connecting gamers across the world, and ultimately that became Xbox Live. From a hardware perspective, we knew early on we had to invest in things like, a hard drive, an ethernet port.”
“At the time, people were gaming on 56K modems. It was out of left field for us to invest in this hardware. We believed in our vision. So, for us, it’s about betting on the future, rather than against the future. We want to go where players are going and build the right platform to allow developers to build on their creative vision.”
For the remainder of the enlightening conversation, Ronald and Beaumont shared some insights into the development of Xbox’s PC service including offline play, Xbox Ally design features, and went more into depth on Xbox Play Anywhere. Developers have to opt-in to the Xbox Play Anywhere feature, which is essentially giving away multiple copies of their game away with a single purchase (one for Xbox, one for PC, etc.), potentially losing them money, though fans have expressed a stronger interest in purchasing games that include the feature, especially with all of the upcoming new ways to play!
Newer games like Wuchang: Fallen Feathers are being released with Xbox Play Anywhere, but then having it removed after sales failed to meet expectations, while other titles like Ready or Not have released without the feature and added it in post-launch to extraordinary results. My hope is that Microsoft focuses on what matters most, and to me, that’s a quality gaming experience on whatever device meets their players’ preferences. If they can pull this off seamlessly, I think their future will be very bright and continue to expand into something special. I’m cautiously optimistic.
