Microsoft is blurring the lines between consoles and PCs

Theguardian

January 30, 2024

The release of Windows 10 was an especially important event for gamers, because it marked the beginning of Microsoft’s attempts to blur the lines between console and PC gaming. In the time since the operating system was released, Microsoft has enabled several cross-platform features that would’ve been unthinkable last generation, including streaming games from your Xbox One to your PC, but that’s only the beginning. Phil Spencer, the head of the Xbox division, announced last week that Microsoft is planning to unify the Xbox One and PC gaming platforms, and that the company wants the Xbox One to have a PC-like upgrade system in the future.

Microsoft is planning to unify its PC and Xbox One gaming platforms into one ecosystem running Universal Windows Applications (UWAs), the head of the company’s Xbox division Phil Spencer has announced. It also looks likely that the Xbox One will become more PC-like with backwards compatible hardware upgrades in the future. During a press event in San Francisco last week, Spencer said that the Universal Windows Platform, a common development platform that allows apps to run across PC, Xbox, tablets and smartphones, would be central to the company’s gaming strategy. “That is our focus going forward,” he told reporters. “Building out a complete gaming ecosystem for Universal Windows Applications.” This is, he explained, the culmination of the company’s vision over the past year. In January 2015, Microsoft announced that it was bringing an Xbox app to Windows 10 PCs, allowing cross-platform play and a cohesive friends list across both platforms. Then, in November, the Xbox One was updated to be compatible with Windows 10, bringing a new interface and features to the console. In late-January, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told attendees at the dotNet conference in Madrid that UWAs would be coming to Xbox One, but did not specify in what capacity.