Xbox First-Party Titles Will Not Replicate What Sony and Nintendo Are Doing, Phil Spencer Says; xCloud Will Have An Impact In A Lot Of Places

The Xbox Studios are working hard on its first-party titles line-up, but they are not trying to emulate what Sony and Nintendo are doing for their titles.

Speaking in a recent GameLab online event, Xbox head Phil Spencer commented on the company’s first-party titles, highlighting how they are important to their hardware platforms and overall gaming strategy.

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First-party content is really important to where we’re going. It’s important to our hardware platforms, it’s important to things like Game Pass and our overall gaming strategy at Microsoft. As we got in place the new leadership team a few years ago, we started building our strategy and articulating our strategy internally to the company, it was really encouraging to see the support that we were getting from the board and the senior leadership team at the company to go and grow our first-party.

Phil Spencer feels good about these first-party Xbox games, confirming that many have yet to be announced. These games are not going to emulate what the competition is doing, as doing so is not going to help the industry as a whole.

But I will also say we are going to create our first-party around the things that we feel like we need to do in order to stand up for Xbox. Sometimes we get suggestions of, ‘Where’s your X game?’ or, ‘Where’s your Y game?’ when people look at the other hardware platforms. But I don’t think our goal is to replicate what other people have done. It doesn’t help the industry to have people that are trying to do exactly the same thing with their platforms, services, or content.

Phil Spencer also talked about xCloud. While the service is not going to take over anytime soon, it represents a new canvas for game creators, as they are keeping track of played games, the length of a session, and so on, and it will have an impact in a lot of places both expected and unexpected.

Microsoft’s next-gen console is the Xbox Series X, which will release later this year. A second next-gen console currently known as Lockhart is also in the works, and it should be revealed soon.