In a recent interview with Eurogamer, the big cheese of Xbox reiterated his stance on the gap in sales between the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, stating that he’s not overly concerned with catching up to them through such things as price cuts or ‘other means’ but rather, by offering owners of the console top quality, first-party exclusives.
I honestly don’t goal the team on how many units Sony sells. I think about what we’re going to do, and how many Xbox customers we have across 360, Xbox One and Windows – thinking about the combined community of people on Xbox and playing those games, and that number’s never been bigger.
There are ways to sell consoles by losing more money on hardware and building an unnatural business construct that I’d never want to do – at the end, when people make a commitment to Xbox and the consoles they buy, the games they buy, they want to know that Microsoft and Xbox is in it for the long run. To sacrifice the long term for any short term gain doesn’t make any sense.
Next year’s line-up is pretty incredible, and we haven’t even talked about all the games that are coming next year. Investments in first-party, there’s more risk involved, and people can say it’s more challenging building first party investments, and you could say it’s easier doing third-party deals, but they’re critical to our business, and we’re in this for the long run.
Sceptics may deem the comments to be a form of damage control, but Spencer certainly has the means to back up his views. Sony was absent from this year’s Gamescom – having opted not to hold a press conference – and the Xbox One line-up has really never looked stronger. Crackdown 3, Recore and Scalebound – to name just a few – are all Xbox One exclusives that fans have to look forward to going into 2016 and beyond.