In a dramatic move for tech juggernaut Microsoft and gaming at large, Xbox head Phil Spencer has revealed plans to potentially erase the long standing divide between console and PC gaming via the Xbox One.
The move comes after a press event last week in San Francisco, where Spencer spoke about the potential of Microsoft’s new UWAs – Universal Windows Applications. A UWA is an application that can run on any Windows platform – be it the Xbox One, Windows 10, or tablets and smartphones – through a proposed Universal Windows Platform that is central to Microsoft’s gaming strategy moving forward.
“That is our focus going forward,” Spencer said. “Building out a complete gaming ecosystem for Universal Windows Applications.”
What followed was the outlining of a plan that sounded an awful lot like the current plan for the Xbox One is the bridging of the gap between the development models for consoles and PC – a divide that has existed in the gaming industry more or less since the beginning. Whereas previous console development was determined by a lock on software and hardware intended to last for an unspecified time (creating the “generation” model of classes of consoles), Spencer said that “we’re allowing ourselves to decouple our software platform from the hardware platform on which it runs.”
Spencer continued by outlining a plan that could lead to Xbox One becoming a form of “forward compatible,” where new hardware updates can be introduced in the middle of a generation of consoles and moving all software (e.g. games themselves) into becoming Universal Windows Applications, running on a Universal Windows Platform. Fundamentally, this indicates an absence of difference in software between games made for Xbox One and PC – a plan that makes the recent announcement that purchases of Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break on Xbox One will also grant you a PC copy of the game, but not on Steam, less of a bizarre outlier and more of a standard bearer for Xbox moving forward.
It also casts into a new light Xbox’s recent dedication to backwards compatibility and PC integration of the Xbox App on Windows 10 – Spencer claimed that the plan moving forward with the Universal Windows Platform is to develop cross-platform play as a functional reality (despite several attempts over the years, it must be said true 1-1 cross platform play has never been successfully accomplished). “Hardware innovation continues,” Spencer noted, “while the software innovation is able to take advantage, and I don’t have to jump a generation and lose everything that I played on before.”
That is, of course, more or less the definition of “a PC,” complete with the potential for getting far enough behind on updated console hardware that games are not optimized for low-end consoles – possibly rendering the “unified platform” thing moot. But on a theoretical level, the idea of never losing the prior generation of games to antiquated programming and firmware differences is incredibly appealing and ludicrously ambitious. If accomplished, at the bare minimum, it represents a fundamental shift in how we think of console generations and development. The kind of thing that hasn’t happened in a very long time.
Original source: The Guardian
