Microsoft is going big with Xbox Game Pass, and it wants to go even bigger.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer said during the San Francisco’s Barclays conference this week Microsoft wants to bring Xbox Game Pass to “every device.”

Keep in mind Spencer’s talk was main centered on smartphones, according to Gamespot (thanks, GI.biz), but he never said ‘just mobile.’

Spencer’s comment echos one he made during E3 2018. Closing out the Xbox showcase, Spencer told the crowd Microsoft was committed to the cloud, and it wants people to play games “where they want, when they want, on any device they want.” This is something Ubisoft and EA want as well, and believe it will come to pass thanks to cloud technology.

Microsoft’s Project xCloud will help in this regard, on mobile that is, thanks to the company’s new streaming service. Announced in October, it goes into public testing next year and if all goes according to plan, offering Xbox Game Pass on mobile would be the next step.

“We need to make sure that we’re world-class at free-to-play content, but we also look at subscription as a much lower barrier way for a customer to build a library of content,” said Spencer at the Barclays conference. “So we built Xbox Game Pass. It started on console, it will come to PC, and eventually it will come to every device.

“We use the flywheel that we have with customers on an Xbox to start the growth in Xbox Game Pass. But as somebody sitting back and taking a longer-term view of where our business is going, you should look at that as a business model that we think scales to billions of people not hundreds of millions of people like retail does.”

The company said in October it planned to expand Xbox Game Pass to PC, which means at some point, games on the service offered by publishers other than Microsoft will be playable.

As as GI.biz notes, during Spencer’s talk he never said Xbox Game Pass would only arrive on ‘console, then PC, then mobile’, but “every device”.

Considering Microsoft’s relationship with Nintendo is continuing to warm, it’s possible the service could eventually come to a Nintendo device. Maybe not this generation, but in the future.

Sony? That’s an entirely different story. It’s just nowt starting to relent on cross-platform play with Fortnite, but it has always kept its door shut to rival hardware.

Posted: Dec 08, 2018 1:03 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://www.vg247.com/2018/12/07/spencer-wants-xbox-game-pass-on-every-device/