Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, has plenty to think about, from the next generation of Xbox consoles to helping build new development teams. He and the team are also managing an ecosystem that`s trying to serve the needs of as many players as possible. Cloud-based gaming touches all of those areas, which is why he`s been championing Project xCloud, Microsoft`s game streaming technology that will let you access the power of an Xbox console through your phone via an internet connection. We recently got the opportunity to talk to the head of Xbox about a number of topics, including how he sees xCloud fitting into Xbox`s repertoire, and within an industry that`s traditionally orbited around consoles in the home.`It`s one of the directions the industry is headed. To me, it`s about what you as a gamer want to do, and I`m not trying to tell you that owning a box that plays video games is a bad thing or that somehow that`s not needed.` Spencer continued, `I think that the cloud inevitability as part of gaming is absolutely true. But we have more compute devices around us than we`ve ever had, whether it`s your phone, a Surface Hub, or an Xbox. The world where compute devices are gone and it`s all coming from the cloud just isn`t the world that we live in today.`Physical devices are still very much part of the equation when it comes to cloud gaming, but Xbox itself isn`t making a new device specifically for it. `Last year we talked about xCloud and then we said we were working on new game consoles, but that`s all I said.` Spencer clarified, `We didn`t say that [a streaming console was in the works]. I think maybe some people thought that that was the disc-less one that we just shipped. We are not working on a streaming-only console right now. We are looking at the phone in your pocket as the destination for you to stream, and the console that we have allows you to play the games locally.``If you bought a big gaming PC and you like playing games there, I want to respect that a ...
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