Interview met Phil Spencer over E3 en de One:
http://www.eurogamer.net/(...)r-discusses-xbox-onequote:
Eurogamer: But what about some of the policies the Xbox One implements that we haven't seen before? What about the reaction to those?
Phil Spencer: The policy decisions that were made: first, I'm not sure we've never seen these before - if you look at other ecosystems where content exists, there's definitely...
Eurogamer: I mean in regard to Xbox 360 versus Xbox One.
Phil Spencer: So the policies, as we look forward and start thinking about a connected space and, as you've asked, what impact can connectivity have on games themselves and the experiences I'm going to play? And then there are other things that we're thinking about: just as an example, I want your library to be your library wherever you go, similar to my music being mine on the devices that I plug into - my ability to plug in to my television video content wherever I go through services like Netflix and other things. We think about gaming content in the same way, because people are playing games across every device. People have - they're gonna end up with consoles in multiple rooms in their home over time. Not everybody, but you see that happening today. And the physical medium itself - I'm not going to say that this is the predominant case - does have some kind of shelf life (it can be scratched).
Basically what we've said is you can install the bits to the hard-drive and then you have a licence for that content in the cloud for you wherever you go, regardless of what happens to the disc. That content is yours, it will roam wherever you go, it will work, and we think there are distinct advantages of you having the content that you own associated with you and your identity.
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Eurogamer: I think everyone would agree that those benefits are wonderful, but the trade-off I see is the concept of game ownership is changing. Xbox One means the idea of owning a physical disk and being able to do whatever you want with it, as gamers have done for years, is going away. There's a reaction to that, as this is changing how we think about game ownership.
Phil Spencer: You positioned that very well. We're going through a transition; you've seen this in other mediums. What we thought about was the physical disc does have meaning to people but we want to make sure the secondary market is something we support, so that's why we wanted to put out the policies we put out on Xbox Wire [the press site] to let people know they can gift their content to their friends. They can resell the disc in a secondary market.
As you go through a transition it's definitely true that you're not going to be able to support every single thing. But as you look forward and you think about the benefits, we asked, what are the systems we have to put in place to support these benefits, and what are the features of the existing scenario that we want to make sure we want to support? And we said we wanted to support the secondary market - we put up the policy that said we want to support the secondary market, and that was really in service of the gamers who look at that secondary market as a really important part of their game collecting.
Eurogamer: You say that, but how is it going to work long-term? Will Xbox One games last you years and years and years, as they have done in the past? Can you turn them off? Can they be made inactive in any sense?
Phil Spencer: Microsoft is obviously a big company and we're in this business for the long-run, we've shown that over the last decade - the original Xbox, the Xbox 360 - we've had a commitment to gamers and a commitment to the customers. We've run the Xbox Live service now for many years, and we've learned what it means to run a global entertainment network. We're now 47 million people-plus on that network, and our commitment to the services that we offer through Xbox Live has always been one of our key principles when we think about how we're going to run the business - service availability as well as just continuing to grow the capabilities.
When we think about content that's associated with your account, we think about it in exactly the same way: when somebody buys content from us, it's a commitment we have that content will work for them, it will roam with them - they will have the advantages of the license associated with their identity, whether you go to your friend's house and you want to play the games that you own, if you want your family to be able to play all of the games in your library - your library is going to roam with you. There's some distinct advantages across any console in your home - there's some distinct advantages that we're trying to put in place. And that's a commitment to we have to the customer in the long-run, absolutely.
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Eurogamer: Was Xbox One being always-online from the very beginning - and I'm trying to understand this, I think everyone is trying to understand this - about looking to the future, almost five, 10 years in the future and seeing where things are going and almost getting there early and planning for the this digital life that we are going to lead? Is that what this about: trying to look into the future and give us that now?
Phil Spencer: Looking into the future is always a challenge. I don't claim to know what's coming in the future. We can see examples on other devices today where a majority of your media has gone digital and there are distinct advantages to that. I'm not even sure I would say it's five or 10 years from now. If you think what's happened in music and books and television shows it's kind of here. We also know when someone's going to come and buy an Xbox One, we want to make a long-term commitment to that customer; this is a box that will be valid five years from now and relevant and important - and will be relevant 10 years from now for consumers.
Look at what we've done with the 360 over the time it's been in market: it's had an amazing run. It's been great that the gamers have been there. They've supported the platform, they've supported Live and the creators that are on the box. We've redone the dash of the box three times, if you think about the original blades on your Xbox and the different experiences. We've continued with diversification of business model. We've brought in more video content and we'll continue to evolve that.
With Xbox One it's exactly the same. I want to think, as much as I can, forward five or 10 years and say, what are the things that are going to have to be in place for this machine to be as relevant then as it is now? Connectivity I think is going to be core to that.