GamesBeat: It seems like it’s gotten harder to define what an indie game is these days. The debate over who was friendlier to indies was interesting because of that.
Spencer: I just go around kicking them. [laughs] It’s good for the console business that we have such a diversity of developers creating hits. Three or four years ago, there was an anticipation that the console game space was going to be winnowed down to three or four big franchises and everyone else would go away. You remember the whole dialogue around whether the mid-tier was going to go away on console. That space where you’re not big, but not really small, was going to die.
As more developers have come in, more styles of games have come in, and the online ecosystem has strengthened, you’ve seen that the thousands of developers finding success on Android or iOS or PC can also find consoles as a viable place to release their games. That’s great for the console business.
As far as who’s friendlier, that’s more of a little PR thing than anything else. We’ve had great indie games on our platform. Sony has a great lineup of indie games. In the end, if you’re an indie developer, you want your games in the hands of as many people as you can get them to. We’re both creating ecosystems that make that possible with self-publishing.
For us, turning retail kits into development kits was a pretty important part of our road map. That had to be planned in pretty early, when we thought about the security model of the box and the OS. Cost, for an indie — which I talked about on the server side — is an issue. If you can turn your retail kit into a development kit and back and forth, if you can build your game and test your game and play your game at the cost of a retail kit, that can help unlock things for the indies. We’re not there right now, but we’ve announced that plan. We’ll get there in the not too distant future.
Above: PlayStation 4
GamesBeat: Have the other guys said anything that’s really set you off? Is there anything you feel like you need to answer?
Spencer: [laughs] Actually, no. They’re good teams. They’re in it for the same reason. There’s a little bit of — I mean, there’s going to be a billion Android devices sold this year. We’re all competing in this space with a lot of devices that are capable of doing more and more things. In some ways, we’re bound together as people trying to make the television as capable as any other device. There is a possible world where the television falls off of the compute bandwagon. I don’t really believe in that, but if you think around the proliferation of tablets and phones—My daughters are 18 and 15. They watch most of their TVs on their tablets. That’s where they get most of their content.
So in some ways, I think we are somewhat together in what we’re trying to go innovate. We’re taking different approaches to it, but—Adam got me with his T-shirt. What did it say, “Random Indie Developer Logo Here”? That was well-done. I told him to send me a shirt, which he still hasn’t done. [laughs] I don’t just say this because it’s an interview. I have a lot of respect for what they’re trying to do and the success they’ve had with what their studios do.
GamesBeat: With that said, how do you feel about some of the other competition coming in to the playing field? Valve is coming out with their Steam machines. How do you feel about them bringing their living-room strategy into the mix?
Spencer: Or even the Ouya, right? That’s in Target now. I got my Ouya a month ago, I think, and I’ve been playing a little bit of that. First, Valve and some of the people behind Ouya, we know them well. Valve is right down the street from us. They’ve done a great job of keeping the PC ecosystem strong at a time where I don’t mind saying that we could have been more focused on what was going on in PC gaming. We were probably too focused purely on console. With Steam they’ve done an amazing job of building this thing that, in a lot of ways, we should have been building as well at Microsoft. When you see what we’re trying to do now, we’re probably more invested now in Windows gaming than we have in a long time, and in studios.
We’ve had Media Center and other things where people plug a PC into the television. There can be some challenges there. There are some things about that, just the way the technology is built and what it’s expecting, that aren’t always natural. That’s why we built the Xbox in the beginning, because plugging a PC into your TV can be a challenge for the non-tech-savvy. You don’t want your TV to crash.
But Valve is a very strong company. Gabe and Scott Lynch and those guys are incredibly smart. I have a ton of respect for what they’re going to do. They have a good first party. If you look at them and think about Half-Life and Left 4 Dead and Counter-Strike and DOTA, they’re a strong competitor that I look at. I’ve been really impressed with what they’ve done over the last 10 years, what they’ve built with Steam and everything else.
GamesBeat: How do you feel about their Linux push? Most game servers are on Linux, but that’s about as far as it goes.
Spencer: Yeah. This is where I think they’re going to have to do quite a bit of work. There is a difference between being a game developer, running a store, and being a platform company. That’s an evolutionary jump. They made the jump from building Half-Life to having a set of franchises to running Steam. They did a good job learning through that.
Now they’re taking the next job to becoming a platform company – in some sense a hardware company, but in the truest sense more of an OS company. That’s not an easy transition. Like I said, they’re smart. They’ve been through it. I think they can do it. But I think it will take time. As far as the OS, obviously, we love Windows. Linux isn’t Windows. We’re focused on making Windows and Xbox and Windows Phone the best connected ecosystem we can.
GamesBeat: Does Windows Phone come into the picture much for you? There was Halo for Surface.
Spencer: And Phone. Spartan Assault is out on the phone.
GamesBeat: Do you foresee more of that coming, where you can try to do an exclusive for those platforms?
Spencer: I do. The experiences that allow me to connect into a game experience or an ecosystem across any of these devices, with the strength of identity — We have Xbox Live on every one of those platforms. We have your friends list. We have your achievements. We know what content you own. We’re able to think about how to build out those ecosystems.
We launched a game — It’s not the biggest game, but last January we launched Skulls of the Shogun simultaneously on 360, Windows, and Windows Phone. We let you play, pause, or zoom across any of the screens, so you could start playing on the 360, continue on the phone, and continue on the Windows machine. We’re going to continue to push in those areas. For us as a company, obviously, it’s important. But I also think, more and more, just as creators, those are the games we’re going to want to build.
You see games like Clash of Clans going to Android now. People want to get on more and more of the devices. You need to reach consumers wherever they are with your IP. That’s what Netflix does. That’s what ESPN is doing. As game creators, we’re going to want to do the same thing. It might not be the exact same game, but some way of connecting in so I’m playing and it matters to the game world I’m investing in, absolutely.
Above: Phil Spencer of Microsoft Game Studios
GamesBeat: What do you think about the sales pitch for the Xbox One, given that there are things like the iPhone, the iPad, all these other things that weren’t there at past launches? There are so many other ways to play games. What’s the best pitch for Xbox now?
Spencer: I start with the relevancy of a TV in the home. The TV screen itself still remains the most important screen. I think about how I arrange the furniture in my house around that screen. So when I think about our pitch for — whether you like the term or not — an all-in-one entertainment device that takes all the interactive social that we’ve learned in gaming and brings that to every form of entertainment that you have on your television, that’s our critical differentiator as a platform.
It’s why we’ve focused so much on the HDMI passthrough, on making sure that voice is always there. It’s taking that magic of knowing who your friends are, being able to connect to your friends across any experience. You can play together, and now you can do that with gaming, entertainment, music, video, all on one box that uniquely understands who you are. That’s the pitch.
Day one, we know the customer is a core gamer. That’s why we do events like this and invest so heavily in core games. But over a long life cycle, this console is going to be as much about the all-in entertainment value as it is just about core games.