Two years later, many of these initial failings have been fixed. But rumors that Microsoft would like out of the Xbox business continue to swirl, prompted partly by stealthy executive departures and ongoing legal issues surrounding the Xbox 360’s disc-scratching problems.It’s difficult to know what to make of the Xbox One. When Microsoft first debuted the console nearly two years ago, its vision of the future of gaming slammed face first into therock wall of consumer expectations. Microsoft offered a second-generation motion tracker with voice commands and an “always on” capability — but consumers didn’t want it. The company declared that online and retail disc purchases would be treated the same, only to find that customers valued the ability to trade in games at a local store. It promised a future in which families and friends could share games out of a common library — but at the cost of offline play.
Discussions of whether Microsoft wants to keep the Xbox One business for itself tend to devolve into arguments over whether the console is profitable (or profitable “enough”), or assume that any divestment would, by necessity, mean the end of the Xbox One as we know it. The former is inaccurate and the second improbable. Microsoft is actually well positioned to spin the Xbox One division off to another company — Redmond has decades of experience in providing software tools that other businesses use and rely on. A spin-off might change the branding and the long-term vision, but the hardware would remain fundamentally reliant on Microsoft operating systems, APIs, and development tools, at least through the end of this generation. Integration with another major company’s core services or software products could be layered on top of the existing Xbox One OS — since the box already runs a modified version of Windows, this would be fairly simple to arrange.
The argument for selling the Xbox One relies less on proclamations of doom and gloom and more on the question of where Satya Nadella wants to focus. Despite some departures and changes, I think Microsoft’s own roadmap for the Xbox One — and its integration with both Windows 10 and DirectX 12 — tell us most of what we need to know about the future of the platform.
The impact of DirectX 12, Windows 10 streaming
Microsoft made multiple high-profile announcements around the Xbox One earlier this year, when it declared Windows 10 would have the native ability to stream Xbox games to anywhere across the home network. We’ve advocated for this kind of feature for years, and are thrilled to see it happening — game streaming is a category that Microsoft should have owned already, thanks to its huge share of the PC market. You could even argue giving away Windows 10 is a way to further sweeten the deal, since it increases the chance more users will upgrade.
DirectX 12 is another interesting feature that could improve the Xbox One. At GDC, Stardock’s Brad Wardell argued that Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have all been lying about the benefits of DX12 because they don’t want to admit just how badly DirectX 11 was broken. Admitting the benefits of DX12 would, according to Wardell, “mean acknowledging that for the past several years, only one of your cores was talking to the GPU, and no one wants to go, ‘You know by the way, you know that multi-core CPU? It was useless for your games.’ Alright? No one wants to be that guy. People wonder, saying ‘Gosh, doesn’t it seem like PC games have stalled? I wonder why that is?”
CPU performance in DirectX 12
If D3D12 offers the same performance improvements as Mantle, we’ll see it boosting gameplay in titles where the CPU, rather than the GPU, is the primary bottleneck. So far, this doesn’t appear to be the case in many games — the Sony PS4 is often somewhat faster than the Xbox One, despite the fact that the Xbox One has a higher CPU clock speed. Whether this is the result of some other programming issue is undoubtedly game-dependent, but DX12 simply doesn’t look like an automatic speed boost for the Xbox One — it’s going to depend on the game and the developer.
Taken as a whole, however, the Windows 10 integration and D3D12 work mean that two of Microsoft’s largest core businesses — its PC OS and its gaming platform — are now separated almost entirely by function rather than any kind of intrinsic capability.
Microsoft’s last, best hope
As a recent GamesIndustry.biz piece points out, Microsoft may be stuck with Xbox One for a very simple reason: There aren’t many companies that have both the capital and the interest in gaming to buy the segment at anything like a fair price. It’s entirely possible that Nadella would prefer to be out of gaming, but he’s not willing to defund and destroy the segment if he can’t find a buyer.
Regardless of whether Microsoft has explored selling the unit, the company is finally taking the kinds of steps that its customers are likely to value — steps that could allow it toleverage the strengths of PC and Xbox gaming side-by-side, rather than simply walling off the two groups of customers in separate gardens. It’s not hard to see how Microsoft could eventually extend things the other direction as well, offering PC game buyers with Xbox One’s the ability to stream PC titles to the television. True, this would compete more closely with some of Steam’s features, but Microsoft has to be aware that a company other than itself controls the keys to PC gaming — and doubtless has ideas about how it could change that situation. The fact that it didn’t play out this generation doesn’t mean it won’t, long term.
The Xbox One may have had one of the most disastrous debuts in the history of modern marketing, and it has a great deal of ground to make up, but Microsoft has proven willing to adapt the console to better suit the needs of its target audience. Taking the long view, it’s hard to argue that Microsoft’s system is at a greater disadvantage than the PS3 was at launch, with terrible sales, few games, and a huge price tag. The Xbox 360 led the PS3 in total sales for most of last generation, even after the RROD debacle, but in the final analysis the two platforms ended up selling virtually the same.
If Microsoft’s gambits work, the Xbox One’s Windows 10 streaming and future cross-play opportunities could take it from also-ran to preferred-platform status.
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