Phil Spencer Teases Xbox “Streaming Sticks”

In a recent interview with Stratechery, Phil Spencer suggested the launch of streaming sticks for xCloud. The executive also announced a new tier of Xbox Game Pass.

“I think you’re going to see lower priced hardware as part of our ecosystem when you think about streaming sticks and other things that somebody might want to just go plug into their TV and go play via xCloud,”… “You could imagine us even having something that we just included in the Game Pass subscription that gave you an ability to stream xCloud games to your television and buying the controller.”

The head of Xbox mentioned an “Xbox Game Pass Platinum”, the idea is pack in one box the controller, the membership, and the stick that can be connected to an HDTV. Users will have hundreds of games and the complete Xbox ecosystem. Windows Central can confirm that Microsoft has been working since 2016 on a similar dongle to stream Xbox games, but the Microsoft’s Azure technology wasn’t ready for be deployed to millions of players back then.

Spencer has openly discussed the future of gaming, he is confident that Xbox will dominate the industry not by selling consoles, but by having a robust portafolio of Xbox games on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, and it’s Could Streaming service Project xCloud.

In  February, The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences published an episode of its Game Maker’s Notebook Podcast where, Ted Price and Phil Spencer, discussed the future of gaming consoles. Spencer revealed back then the vision of Microsoft is to develop an app for HDTVs where users can play Xbox games via streaming.

“I think we’re going to end up with more differences underneath our TVs than we did before. I do think there’ll probably be a plethora of streaming-only consoles that don’t have a disk drive, don’t have a storage device, and everything is coming through, and then it’s how do I get the signal to the TV… maybe some of those are built-in…

Microsoft’s Game Stack chief James Gwertzman, has shared what Phil Spencer communicates to the team of executives at Xbox.

“It is schizophrenic. Phil says, over and over again, that we in the gaming division need to find a way to reach the 2.8 billion gamers in the world that we believe there are. That’s a number that you hear over and over again in internal meetings. 2.8 billions gamers in the world, and we need to reach them all.

We acknowledge that we will never reach more than 100 million of them by selling them an Xbox. The only way to reach the remaining 2.7 billion is something else, whether it’s xCloud or things like Playfab, where we’re not reaching them directly, but we’re providing technologies to help reach them. Or Azure, or something.”

Source: Stratechery

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