On the first day of this month in IGN’s most recent Unlocked podcast, Ryan McCaffrey had an exciting discussion with Xbox head, Phil Spencer, for an exclusive one-hour interview. This discussion centered on Xbox Series X price, coronavirus impact on the upcoming console, the first-party launch lineup, reason for the absence of optical out port on Series X, cross-play, xCloud, the hopes of Sunset Overdrive, Scalebound and Ryse, coming back to Microsoft and other topics.
According to Nathan Birch’s coverage on Wccftech on the ‘agile price plan that can win,’ Spencer noted he plans to stay agile when, as regards the price of the Series X and that they have workable plans for the console launching this year amid the current crisis.
Or you can watch the podcast here:
Here are some nuggets to take from the show notes of the podcast:
‘We’re definitely going to be keeping our eyes wide open as we continue toward launch,’ noted Spencer. ‘Based on what the competition is doing, we sure have a plan, and we feel very certain about our plan. Remember, long ago, you and I sat in a room, and I said that I was going to win, and you got frustrated with me for years about ‘what the planning was about?’ well, I believe we have a plan that can win.’
While the podcast was going on, Spencer didn’t only focus on the price of the upcoming Series X, and he also acknowledged the competition in the form of Sony’s PS5. When Ryan asked Phil about his response to the PS5 in-depth specs unveiling, he noted that while the PS5’s 3D audio tech and PSS’s SSD is spectacular, the Series X team is more confident about the design choices they made.
Here’s what Microsoft’s head said,
‘I felt really good about how series X lines up. I think Mark and the team did pull off some excellent work on the audio processing they spoke about, also their SSD tech is impressive, and we like that.’
He continued saying:
‘We saw the work they did. However, we took a full view on our platform from CPU to GPU to RAM to velocity architecture to throughput, latency backward compatibility. We can say it took us years to get to this point. In that sense, I have respect for any platform that’s launching, because it demands a lot of human capital.’
According to Spencer, while they were happy about their decisions on the Xbox Series X, they got even more thrilled when they finally saw the public disclosure.
In his words:
‘But I will say, when we finally saw the public disclosure, I felt so much better about the choices that we made on our platform.’ He also said: ‘and I expected that I would.’
He also had remarks for the Xbox One S and X team saying:
‘The hardware team that did Xbox One S and Xbox, I just have a lot of confidence in them. If I set a deadline for them, I believe in their capability to deliver a great end-to-end program.’
Hopefully, let’s lookout for the release of Xbox Series X this year’s holiday season.
