Microsoft will combine the Xbox and PC platforms

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox at Microsoft, announced the upcoming merger of Xbox consoles with the PC platform . Separate game consoles will disappear, and their place will be taken by hybrid systems on which applications of class Universal Windows Applications will be launched (universal Windows applications, UWA).



The UWA platform, which allows applications to run on PCs, Xboxes , and mobile devices, will be the central motive of the game development strategy. “It’s our goal to create a full-featured gaming ecosystem based on Universal Windows Applications,” he explained at a conference in San Francisco.

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Last January, the creation of an Xbox application for work on a computer running Windows 10 was announced, and in November Xbox One was updated for compatibility with Windows 10.



Now the development is moving to combine the console with the personal, and to make the console less closed - in particular, to facilitate the possibility of its upgrade. Fans of games for personal computers can regard this as a victory over the ideology of closed video consoles.



Spencer voiced quite obvious things: because of the closed consoles, their updating is not as fast and constant as that of the staff. Microsoft invents the bicycle, "separating the software platform from the hardware on which it works." In addition, this direction of development promises such pleasant things as automatic backward compatibility of old games.



Spencer said that thanks to this decision, there are more games in development at the moment than ever before. In addition, thanks to the cross-platform, the user, buying the game for one device, will automatically receive it for all the others (it’s not like the publisher who loses the opportunity to sell the game several times - it’s not clear)



Xbox Development Manager also mentioned that games are one of the priorities for Microsoft, since about 40% of Windows 10 users play games.



In theory, the idea of ​​the UWA platform, which unites several devices and allows one to abstract from a specific hardware, sounds tempting. But how will it work in practice? Byron Atkinson-Jones [Byron Atkinson-Jones], a veteran of game development, currently managing his independent company Xiotex, sees in this both positive and negative sides.



He believes that on the one hand, the idea of ​​a single platform instead of a large zoo of devices that must be taken into account, of course, looks attractive. On the other hand, “the PC is wonderful because anyone can make a game for it, and the UWA system looks like it will be supervised from the outside, and some kind of registration will be necessary to use it.”



In addition, the developer is concerned that if now when developing a game for Xbox, programmers know the exact specifications of hardware, then in the case of development for UWA, they will have to return to such concepts as minimum system requirements. “Does this not level the whole value of the unified platform idea?” Asked Atkinson-Jones.