by William D’Angelo , posted 13 minutes ago / 135 Views
VP of next-gen Jason Ronald and VP of Xbox Platform Jason Beaumont in the latest Official Xbox Podcast discussed multiple topics including the next-generation of Xbox, the future of Xbox, Xbox Ally, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and more.
“It’s the hardest I’ve ever seen the team working, there’s just so much going on,” said Beaumont (via WindowsCentral). “On the console, a lot of what we’re working on is under the hood. When we release something that’s for PC or for cloud gaming, or for mobile, we want that feature to go everywhere. So that’s a lot of the investments we’re making. Jason mentioned the Xbox Ally and the Xbox Ally X. We’ve been working gangbusters to get that released in time for this holiday.”
Ronald added, “When we think about the future of the Xbox, we think about how we put the player at the center of the experience. The vast majority of players play across multiple devices. There’s a bunch of games I would start playing on the Xbox Ally, and now I want the full fidelity on my console on my big-screen TV. We’re focusing on how we evolve the Xbox ecosystem to allow players to play the games wherever they want to play them.”
Ronald stated that Microsoft wants to continue to build dedicated gaming devices, including the next-generation Xbox.
The Xbox team is working on expanding Xbox Cloud Gaming with the goal “to bring more games to more people,” according to Beaumont. “Cloud is great at that. We want to expand Xbox Cloud Gaming to more countries around the world, so people can play games they love no matter where they are.”
Ronald wants to make Xbox Cloud Gaming “more affordable” and have it “accessible to more players.” This is to make it available in more regions and to have new ways to access it.
“We want to add more value for our most dedicated players. Whether that’s things like adding new first or third-party day-and-date titles, the ability to stream your own games, or even things like adding new free-to-play game benefits,” said Ronald. “We want to add as much value as we can.”
Beaumont discussed Xbox Play Anywhere saying they are “seeing a strong alignment with developers, for titles that support Xbox Play Anywhere, they’re seeing more play, because the game is available on many more screens. When I think about Xbox Game Pass, we had record Game Pass revenue, and we had our all-time high in Xbox Game Pass payouts to developers.
“In addition, we’re also seeing double digit growth in both first and third-party transactions as well. So whether your game is in Game Pass or not, there are many more opportunities for developers to reach players within our community.”
The two also discussed the next-generation of Xbox and their partnership with AMD.
“Xbox and AMD have had a decades-long partnership, innovating in driving the next-generation in gaming. We’re excited to continue that relationship as we look forward to the future of Xbox,” said Ronald.
He added, “We’re deeply focused on hardware and silicon innovation and how we can push the boundaries beyond the current generation of devices. This is grounded in the work we’re doing to build a unified platform across devices in new ways. It’s about ensuring gameplay is not locked to an individual device or storefront. We built our libraries across a whole set of different services, we want to put that experience front-and-centre.
“Together with AMD we’re developing dedicated silicon to power the next-generation of gaming experiences. We’re developing next-generation rendering technologies, including neural rendering. It’s about deepening the immersion. We’re investing in dedicated silicon to develop the next-generation of AI experiences, which will be transformative in how you experience gameplay.
“It also provides a new surface that developers can take advantage of, delivering new kinds of experiences that they weren’t able to deliver before. All of this starts this year with the Xbox Ally X, because it has a dedicated NPU that allows us to experiment with some AI-powered experiences before we get to our next-generation console.”
A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
