Phil Spencer: "We’re the only platform shipping games on PC, cloud and console simultaneously"

Xbox boss Phil Spencer blasted PlayStation's PC strategy in a media briefing earlier this week, accusing Sony of double-dipping with its exclusives.

In recent years, Xbox has made a pretty successful pivot to treating PC as a first-party platform. Most, if not all, first-party games hit the Windows 10 store alongside their console release, with the horrors of Games For Windows Live now a distant memory.

Without naming names, Spencer pointedly compared Xbox's current strategy to certain rivals. PlayStation has only slowly begun to bring its first-party games to PC, starting with Horizon Zero Dawn —which took 3 years to leave console exclusivity.

"We’re the only platform shipping games on PC, cloud and console simultaneously," Spencer boasted. "Others bring console games to PC years later, not only making people buy their hardware up front but then charging them a second time to play on PC.

"We have a huge growth opportunity on PC. We expanded to simultaneously shipping our first-party games on both console and PC. And last year we more than doubled our first-party retail games sales on PC. And we’re also one of the biggest third-party publishers on Steam."

Spencer is bullish about Xbox's future on PC, telling us to expect an "amazing slate" of titles from both Xbox Games Studios and Bethesda over the coming year. But he also seems excited for cloud gaming in the PC space. Considering the difficulty in getting new hardware these days, this may become a very tantalising option indeed.

"With cloud gaming, we now have the ability to bring these great AAA-quality games to the hundreds of millions of below-spec Windows PCs that to date haven’t been able to play the hit games that everybody sees."

The Xbox + Bethesda E3 showcase kicks off this Sunday, June 13th at 10am PDT / 6pm BST.

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20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she's not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it's the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.