- Xbox head Phil Spencer offered his first reaction to the PlayStation 5 technical deep dive this week, and says he feels “really good about how Series X lines up.”
- Sony crushed Microsoft this generation, but Spencer says that his team has a “winning plan” ready for the current generation when the Xbox Series X launches this fall.
- Visit BGR’s homepage for more stories.
The novel coronavirus pandemic has put many of our lives on pause, but many of the high-profile product launches that were set in motion long before the virus turned the world upside-down are still on track for 2020. Few launches are more highly-anticipated than those of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and even in the midst of this crisis, Xbox boss Phil Spencer is still doing press to drum up interest for Microsoft’s next-gen console.
Speaking with IGN’s Podcast Unlocked this week, Spencer offered up his reactions to the PS5 “deep dive” that lead system architect Mark Cerny hosted two weeks ago in relation to the Xbox Series X:
No doubt, I felt really good about how Series X lines up. Now, I think Mark and the team did some really good work on the audio processing that they talked about, their SSD technology is impressive, we like that. We saw the work that they did. But you know, we we took a holistic view on our platform, from CPU, to GPU, to RAM, to throughput velocity architecture, latency, back compat – you know, it took us years to get to this point.
I will definitely have respect for any platform team that’s launching, it just takes a lot of work. But I will say, when we finally saw the public disclosure, I felt even better about the choices that we made on our platform. And I kind of expected that I would.
Spencer is as open and honest an executive as you will find in the industry, but he ascended to his current role when Xbox was stuck in a rut, trying and failing to compete with the generation-winning PS4. The launch of the Xbox Series X will be Spencer’s first real chance to beat Sony at anything, and his confident response speaks volumes about how different he expects this generation to be compared to the last one.
Spencer is also aware that Sony’s decision to undercut the $500 Xbox One with a $400 price tag for the PS4 made a huge difference in 2013, and he doesn’t plan on making the same mistake this holiday season:
You have to set a price target at the beginning for yourselves. And then you kind of roll in as you see the competition come in and start to go to market planning. I feel good about the price that we’re going to be able to get to. I feel good about the price and the performance capabilities that we have with Series X. I feel incredibly strong about the overall package.
We’re definitely going to be continuing to keep our eyes wide open as we go towards launch, looking at what the competition is doing, but you know, we have a plan and we feel very solid about our plan. We think it’s a winning plan. I believe we have a plan that can win, we’ve got to go execute. But I feel really good about the plan that we put together.
You can watch the entire hour-long interview with Phil Spencer on Podcast Unlocked below:
