We zijn bijna aangekomen bij de volgende generatie consoles. Zelfs met de huidige stand van zaken in de wereld, de corona pandemie. Maar zowel Sony als Microsoft hangen nog aan die 2020 lancering, voornamelijk Microsoft. We hebben al heel wat stukken gezien over de specs, een paar titels hebben we gezien, maar het grootste mysterie is de prijs. Er zijn wat geruchten als het gaat om de prijs, dat geldt voor beide consoles. Het hoofd van Xbox geeft een klein stukje van de sluier weg.
Phil Spencer heeft een interview gehad met IGN, hierin ging het grootste geedeelte van de tijd over de Series X. Toen gevraagd werd naar de prijs kwam er helaas geen duidelijk antwoord, meer dat Microsoft tevreden is met de prijs die ze in gedachten hebben.
“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. “We’re getting incredible support from Microsoft. Satya Nadella, the CEO, my boss, Amy Hood, the CFO, they’re very linked in to what our plans are,” aldus Phil. “We’re going to make sure that we stay agile on our pricing and that we have a good plan going into launch.”
Verder ging hij in het interview door op de vraag of de lancering gehaald ging worden, met alle problemen in de productie. Maar zoals het er nu uitziet zal er geen vertraging zijn .
“I’d say pragmatically the supply chains in China have started to come back. I think we’ve seen that in the news that China was obviously earlier in dealing with C-19 before it spread and I think that we can see in the factories and stuff we’re starting to get reports back from them and that that’s working for us. The two big issues we’re kind of monitoring right now, you know, building a video game from home — a large distributed team of hundreds of people is not easy. Video games as we know right now are big and there’s huge massive asset bases that each one of these games have and how you transition I think all those things are…we’re just kind of living.
On the hardware platform side, I think I made it public when I had my Series X at home and I’m using it for testing. As much as I have a great time doing that, that kind of time with the console is important and we want to make sure that we’ve got the right amount of time for the platform tech that we’re putting in place to get all the testing done so we’ve had to move a lot of that testing in the homes. I’d say things right now aren’t easy. I think things are stretched I can feel it in the teams, they’re stretched. We have nothing right now that says we’re not going to make the dates that we’ve been planning, but I’ll also say it, as I said earlier, this is kind of real-time stuff and I’m gonna put the safety and security of the teams at the top along with the quality product. Like, I don’t want to rush a product out if it’s not ready. So, feeling good but also just being eyes wide open.”