Aaron Greenberg, head of Xbox Games Marketing, talked in a recent interview about the powerful nature of Xbox Scorpio and left the door open for future cross-play possibilities with PlayStation 4.
Xbox Games Marketing head Aaron Greenberg talked to MCV and offered more insights about Microsoft’s next plans. As you may imagine, there’s something to say about the Xbox Scorpio, Microsoft’s venture into the world of last-generation-ever upgrades, but he also talked about gaming boundaries, not closing the door to future cross-play schemes between them and Sony.
“For us, we really want to bring our games to as many people as possible,” Greenberg answers when asked about how enabling the Play Anywhere program may tamper Xbox’s sales and hardware. For them, it’s not about separating gaming experiences but going beyond frontiers. “We’re outlining a longer-term vision about building a future beyond console generations,” he adds.
Of course, matters get a little bit trickier when Sony is mentioned. Still, Greenberg keeps all possibilities open and, once again, leaves the ball on Sony’s court. “We put it in the hands of the developers. You have seen with things like Rocket League where we have enabled them to connect Xbox Live gamers with a much broader network of players,” Greenberg says. For instance, Rocket League’s developer Psyonix already offered to allow full cross-play between the two big consoles – as of now, the request is pending Sony’s approval.
Xbox Scorpio is Coming Full-On
E3 saw the announcement of two new devices, the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio. The first one is already on the market and offers 4K content and HDR gaming for a more compact size (40 per cent the original size). Project Scorpio was just teased and aims to create a brand new gaming horizon for everyone. In words of Greenberg, it will “change the way we think about the future of console gaming.” “We’re building the most powerful console ever created,” he claimed. Those are big words – and we’ll still need to keep on feeding on details to see whether the message matches reality.
What we know so far is that the Scorpio will have an 8-core CPU, a six teraflop GPU and 320GB/s of memory bandwidth. It will go one step beyond 4K gaming and it’s, for sure, a heavy console made for VR experiences as well. Microsoft announced that Scorpio will arrive in the holiday season of 2017.
So why teasing the console that early? “We announced that early at E3 so that we can start working with developers and partners who we know will want to take advantage of that incredible amount of power and have a good year plus to be able to plan for it,” said Greenberg. At the moment is still unclear whether the Scorpio will also feed upon exclusive titles or will fully follow the Play Anywhere program. As for the price, you are looking at a beast that will go around the $600 tag.
[Source: MCV]
