XBOX: START TO CONTINUE

An exclusive look inside Microsoft’s plan to turn your Xbox into a PC

By Andrew Webster | Photography by Vjeran Pavic

It was a rare sunny day in Seattle and Phil Spencer seemed very pleased. Sitting across from me in a meeting room at Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond campus, the head of Xbox smiled as he talked, mixing serious discussion about the future of his business with jokes about how his employees dress. (He’s not a fan of cargo shorts in the office.)

It was 2PM, almost exactly a week before today’s E3 keynote in Los Angeles. I’d spent the day speaking with everyone from key members of the Xbox leadership team to the creative leads behind games like Gears of War and Forza, about what they’d present on stage in LA. I also checked out new pieces of hardware, including the much rumored and much smaller Xbox One S, and drove a few laps in the just-announced Forza Horizon 3.

Xbox’s presentation at E3 today points to a future in which the console in your living room behaves a lot like the PC in your office. Microsoft’s approach starts with hardware, where devices like the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio will fundamentally disrupt the tried-and-true console cycle by pushing continuous, periodic updates that take advantage of new technology like 4K and virtual reality. Then there are initiatives like Xbox Play Anywhere, which brings the Xbox One and Windows 10 closer together by letting customers buy a game once and play it seamlessly across both platforms. The vision also includes improvements to Xbox Live that add the kind of functionality PC gamers expect, like persistent chat, on consoles as well as on Windows 10.

Spencer says all these moves stem from a single goal: to merge the often disparate worlds of PC and console gaming, and use that to keep Xbox at the cutting edge. "I think there are things for us to learn and take from the [PC and Xbox] ecosystems to make gaming better. It’s our job as the platform holder to make the console experience feel like the console experience, to make the PC experience feel like the PC experience, and to bring the best from both when we can."

All of this sounds good on paper — and it also sounds very familiar. Last fall, Microsoft invited The Verge to Redmond for an exclusive look at the company’s Xbox strategy. A few years prior, Microsoft suffered a disastrous Xbox One debut. To the consternation of millions of fans, Microsoft had put games aside, instead positioning the Xbox One as the center of your living room entertainment experience. In 2014, Spencer and a new leadership came aboard to refocus Microsoft’s efforts in the console space, and put the emphasis back on the games themselves.

At the time, Spencer laid out an ambitious roadmap that involved putting serious effort and significant resources behind bringing hit games to the Xbox. The plan also included bringing some of those iconic Xbox franchises to the PC. "As we embrace [Windows users] as an active part of the Xbox community," he noted at the time, "it opens up opportunities for our first-party games.... I don’t want to dilute what the Xbox console customer feels," Spencer said. "I want to expand what we’re able to do for more customers."

That sentiment could easily be used to describe the brand-new Xbox Play Anywhere initiative. In effect, today’s E3 keynote indicates that the company is putting into action many of the ideas the company revealed toThe Verge last fall, and expanding on them.

At its keynote, the company unveiled two new iterations of the Xbox One, both slated to launch over the next two years. The first machine isn’t exactly surprising. The Xbox One S, which will debut in August, is a smaller version of the Xbox One, with a white color scheme and a slick, streamlined design. It’s typical of the "slim" refreshes of devices like the Nintendo DS Lite or PS One, though it does add some new functionality, most notably the addition of 4K Ultra HD video support and HDR capabilities. (When Microsoft showed me the One S last week, hardware lead Matt Lapsen hid the device under the shell of an original Xbox One then lifted it up to dramatically reveal just how small the new version was; Spencer called it the "cheesiest thing ever" later in the day.)

Next fall it will be joined by yet another Xbox One, codenamed Project Scorpio. More powerful than the One S, Scorpio will operate at six teraflops, powerful enough to play both 4K-native games and virtual reality experiences (with the addition of an as-of-yet-unknown VR headset). According to Spencer, the improvement between Scorpio and the current Xbox One will be immediately noticeable. "I actually think the upgrade to Scorpio in terms of visual fidelity will feel as dramatic of a change as we’re used to seeing in new generations," he said.

But one of the most significant initiatives doesn’t revolve around a single console, Spencer said — it touches all of them. For decades console gamers have been faced with a persistent problem: when you finally upgrade to a new device, you’re essentially starting over from scratch, building up a new library of games. I can still play my dusty old copy of the first Diablo on my new PC, but apart from a few platforms that offer backwards compatibility, console games live in one console generation. Microsoft has slowly been adding Xbox 360-game support to the Xbox One, but now it plans to radically expand that initiative. Moving forward, Microsoft wants to bring the PC approach to consoles, treating all Xbox One games the same: they’ll all work no matter which iteration of the hardware you own. The next Halo will look better if you have Project Scorpio and a new 4K television to take advantage of all its capabilities, but it will still work on your current machine. "The idea is that wherever we are from the 360 generation on," Spencer says of the ability to carry over your library to new devices, "we’re investing in Xbox Live and content so that as you upgrade the experience moves with you.