PC Gamer: From the talk this morning, it seems like the unification between the two platforms – Windows 10 and Xbox – is one of the things you seem to be working towards. Is that a fair assessment of your PC strategy?
Phil Spencer: I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming. I wouldn’t say our strategy is to unify, because when I hear ‘unify’ I worry a bit that people will interpret, my own teams included, ‘Hey, we just want to say a game is a game and all games should run everywhere.’
There are games I was talking about earlier, like Ashes of the Singularity, a fast-paced RTS game—probably not the best controller game, and I want to make sure those games are great. What I want to make sure is that gamers on our platforms, you feel like you have access to as many games as you can, and as a developer you feel like you have the tools and service to reach as many gamers as you can.
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PC Gamer: Is seeing more of your core franchises come to PC dependant on Quantum Break doing well, and seeing that there’s an ecosystem there?
Phil Spencer: No, we’ve said we have a commitment to bring our biggest franchises. We talked about Halo Wars, we’ve talked about things that... it’s not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna wait and see.’ We’re in, right. We are in, and we want to make sure that PC gamers are able to play PC games that we can go build. I love investing more in PC games. It would be nice to invest in some very tried-and-true PC genres when we think about that, of, ‘hey, let’s go and build some great PC games as part of our portfolio.’ But no, the Quantum Break thing is definitely not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna try this out and see how it does.’ From the top of the company on down, we’re committed to making sure gaming is great on Windows, and we think first-party content has a role to play there.
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PC Gamer: Universal Windows Applications currently don't support a lot of the features PC gamers would expect, for instance multi-GPU support, exclusive fullscreen, modding, etc. What are you doing to improve UWA functionality?
Phil Spencer: Yeah, well, we obviously have the same list, and maybe even a little longer than what the community has brought up around Rise of the Tomb Raider. Certain things will happen very quickly in terms of, like, mGPU support and stuff where there’s no policy, it’s just us working through the timeline of implementation. VSync lock, kind of the same thing. There’s specific reasons that it’s there, but it’s not something that’s kind of a religion on our side that this has to work. Modding, we’re focused on modding even on console with, like, Fallout. We obviously own Minecraft, we understand the importance of modding, and making sure that we support that in the PC ecosystem is critical to UWA success. Our goal is to make UWP [Universal Windows Platform] the best platform for game developers and gamers to support, but we know we’ve got room to grow.
With Tomb Raider coming out, I think for most people that just want to go play a great game the UWA version doesn’t keep them from playing a great game. That’s not to downplay the feature list that people have sent us. I understand the need to react and to fit in in the PC gaming community with the tools that they rightfully want at their disposal. It’s in our tracking system, stuff that we’re going to get done, and we have a real path to get it done. The reason I wanted to articulate those issues and deficiencies is so that people recognise I’m not trying to say they’re not important. I’m not trying to say that, ‘oh, 90% of the people don’t even know what mGPU means so go away.’ I’m saying, ‘no, these are features we know we need to support that we know they’re not there today but we are committed to supporting in the future.’ Because I don’t want people to look at this as a passing fancy on our part of, ‘can we just quickly port some console games over to PC and hope to make a little bit of money?’ It’s not all about that. We are the Windows company, and ensuring that the Windows gaming ecosystem is strong is important, and that means supporting these features.
