Phil Spencer is the boss of Xbox and most of Microsoft’s gaming ventures. He is on record speaking about virtual reality a fair amount, and none of it is too pleasing to any VR fanatic. Phil said ‘nobody is asking for it’ among other things, but most recently, he changed his tone. Phil Spencer did a podcast with Gamertag Radio and he had some interesting stuff to say about the platform. We’ll be breaking it down below.
He starts out saying how he never intended to disrespect the virtual reality community, and that his statements didn’t mean that Xbox would never support the gaming headsets. His comments weren’t final.
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“There are a lot of people I know that are working on some good VR titles – great VR titles – and I’m not trying to be not supportive of that,” he clarified. “My main point was, I wanted to be clear with our customers on where our focus was. So that if somebody was waiting for us to bring out a VR headset for Series X, at the launch or something… we’re not going to do that.”
Breakdown
There’s a lot we can pull from this, but we’ll only bite a chunk we can chew today. “…at the launch or something.” Okay, very interesting, but again, no support coming to the Xbox right away. Understood, but it leaves a crack open at the door for virtual reality to be with the Xbox at some point.
He went onto say that “where our focus was”, emphasizing that their focus wasn’t on VR. Yeah we got that, but why not? Who isn’t asking for VR? Its not the PC gaming world, as they have the SteamVR world wrapped around the finger. No PlayStation user will ask Phill for VR, they have the most successful headset on their platform right now. Even Nintendo fans aren’t asking Phil for VR. They have the Labo headset. Microsoft should be focusing on VR. The only people asking for VR are the Xbox enthusiasts.
He went onto say that Xbox wasn’t going to focus their current resources on the new headset gaming platform. He did say that cloud gaming was a big focus, which is something that could be very cool for Xbox if it was done right.
“I don’t hope it goes away: I hope it gets bigger,” Spencer later concluded. “I hope it’s something that’s so important that it would be a no-brainer for us to go support it. My main point, in that statement wasn’t to shade anybody who’s working on VR or anything but really just about the stuff that we’re focused on right now and that’s not part of the equation right now.”
So there is hope? That is what seems to be the case. Obviously Xbox is going to roll out a headset within the year, but they could if they wanted to. Sadly they don’t want to, so we’ll have to see how the next few years workout and see if Xbox users simply demand it from Spencer. But even then, would he hear them? For more VR news and gaming community content, make sure to check back at VRGear.com.
