Category: phil spencer

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Xbox Still Won’t Adopt VR as Phil Spencer Applauds Sony, Oculus & Valve’s Work

Virtual reality (VR) may have some big backers in the likes of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Facebook and Valve but once again Xbox is staying well away, even whilst heaping praise on those developing the space. In a recent interview, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has once again said VR isn’t of interest with software remaining the core focus for the console.

Xbox Series X

Spencer recently spoke during the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech live event (paywalled), when asked about VR he responded by saying: “I think that when we think about immersion, we think about mixed reality, virtual reality, I’ll even take it to ‘metaverse’, which seems to be the buzzword of the day now,” reports VGC. “We’re big believers in that software platform and the devices that will enable that. Absolutely. [But] we’re focused a lot more on the software side of that right now. When I think about immersive worlds and I think about the connection of a player and community, that’s something that’s very high on our investment list.”

While Xbox is digging deep when it comes to providing its gamers with the best content, Spencer still acknowledged the work being done in the VR space. “I think that the hardware innovation that’s happening is great and it’s an important enabler, [but] right now I’m deciding to stay more in the software side of that enablement. I believe it will scale better in the long run.” He went on to say: “And you know, I applaud what Sony‘s doing, I applaud what Oculus is doing, what Valve has done. I mean, there’s a lot of good players out there that have done some amazing VR work.”

This has been Spencer’s general response to the VR question for several years now, although he has previously been a lot harsher in his responses. It’s all Xbox’s fault in the first place when Spencer himself mentioned VR in his E3 2016 keynote address when talking about Xbox One X – then Project Scorpio. It was after that mention that Xbox quickly avoided any talk of VR.

Bethesda Xbox_HERO

The Xbox team might want nothing to do with VR at the moment but that’s not the case over at Microsoft or even Microsoft Game Studios. The tech giant already has devices like HoloLens 2 – as well as a consumer version – and Windows Mixed Reality on the market. On the studio side of things Microsoft owns the likes of Bethesda, that’s created VR titles and inXile Entertainment (Frostpoint VR: Proving Grounds). And let’s not forget Microsoft Flight Simulator.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Xbox, hopefully, one-day reporting that it has finally embraced VR.

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Phil Spencer: Quest 2 Offers Best VR Experience, Xbox Software On Headsets Possible

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has once again shot down any hopes for an Xbox VR headset in the near future, but hasn’t ruled out Xbox software appearing on other headsets.

Appearing on the latest episode of the Kinda Funny Gamescast, Spencer said that Microsoft didn’t really have any plans for “bespoke accessories” like VR or AR headsets in the near future.

“As it relates to VR specifically, the best experience that I’ve seen is Quest 2. And I just think its untethered ease of use in its capability just doesn’t to me require it being connected to an Xbox in any way,” Spencer said. “So when I look at a scenario like that, I think of XCloud, I think of the Xbox Live community, I think of other things of how could we bring content to a screen like that.

“Whether we do something like that through first-party or third-party partnerships is kind of a second step to do we think the games that we currently have that we’re able to run on our platform would work there.”

Microsoft has played down chances of an Xbox VR headset on numerous occasions over the past few years, despite once saying its Xbox One X console was capable of “high fidelity VR”. But Spencer’s comments about software are interesting – Microsoft has explored bringing Xbox apps and IP to other headsets in the past – the Oculus Rift had an app to stream Xbox One games to a virtual screen and Windows’ own Mixed Reality headsets featured an exclusive Halo minigame.

But his mention of Xcloud here specifically is intriguing; could there be some appeal to using Quest 2 as another destination for Games Pass streaming? As Sony prepares to launch a VR headset for PS5, that could give Xbox some small way to remain in the conversation.

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Xbox Boss ‘Snuck In’ To See Iron Man VR During Development

We finally got our hands on Iron Man VR last week, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer got to see the game even earlier.

Over the weekend Spencer took to Twitter to reveal that developer Camouflaj had brought Spencer to its studio on numerous occasions to play the game over the course of development. It’s notable given that Iron Man VR is a PSVR exclusive published by Xbox rival, PlayStation itself.

In his tweet, Spencer noted that he was “Really proud of a local studio launching an impressive game.”

Now, before we all read too much into Spencer’s not-so-secretive trips and what they might mean for Xbox VR, it’s important to remember Camouflaj was founded by Ryan Payton who worked on Halo 4 before its release in 2012. It’s very likely these trips were based on that friendship rather than Spencer’s desire to research VR on Xbox.

Spencer was also lucky enough to see Half-Life: Alyx ahead of release but even after that experience insisted that VR was not a focus for its next-generation consoles, headlined by Xbox One Series X. In February, he confirmed Series X would not support VR at launch.

Still, we can but keep holding out hope. Last month Microsoft announced a partnership with Facebook after ditching Mixer game streaming, which might lay the foundation for VR support to come.

At least we can agree with Spencer that Iron Man VR is indeed an impressive game. We gave the experience 4/5 in our review, praising the game’s controls and story, even if some technical hiccups hold it back from becoming a true must-play.

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Editorial: Microsoft Partnering With Facebook Gaming Could Be Big For Xbox VR

Earlier this week Microsoft revealed they were ending the Mixer streaming platform and partnering with Facebook Gaming instead. Could this potentially mean big things for Xbox VR support finally via a relationship with Facebook-owned Oculus?

[Editor’s Note]: This was originally published on June 27, 2020 and is being republished on July 23, 2020 after the Xbox Series X Showcase.

In order to understand the significance of what this could mean for Xbox and for VR as a whole, it’s important to first look back and understand the past four years of broken promises and misleading marketing.

project scorpio xbox microsoft

Microsoft’s Frustrating History With Xbox VR

During the E3 2016 Xbox press conference, Phil Spencer was on stage to reveal Project Scorpio, which later went on to be known as the Xbox One X. In that speech, he explicitly stated the console would provide, “true 4K gaming and high-fidelity VR. True 4K visuals without sacrificing quality; premiere VR experiences without sacrificing performance.”

See for yourself at this time stamp:

There were promises of no exclusivity deals, stable 90fps for console VR, and Microsoft’s own Mixed Reality content getting brought over to Xbox VR. In fact, Spencer went so far as to re-confirm VR support was coming to Xbox One X in June 2017 (just five months prior to the console releasing) and then did a complete 180 four months later in October 2017, just a month before it launched, explaining they didn’t want to “distract” developers.

Needless to say the VR promises never materialized. The slogan “hi-fidelity VR” was plastered all over the Project Scorpio website — at least, until it suddenly vanished — and since then Spencer has not stopped backpedaling.

In November of 2019 Spencer went on record as saying that VR is too isolating and that “nobody’s asking for VR” out of their consumer base. Sony’s own Shuhei Yoshida responded on Twitter in a rather coy manner, saying:

Then in February of this year, after the reveal of the Xbox Series X, Spencer explained that he hopes Xbox VR becomes a “no brainer” but that it won’t be there at launch despite the console clearly being powerful enough to support it well.

Meanwhile, in other areas of Microsoft, the Windows Mixed Reality VR platform is continuing along and the HoloLens is already on its second iteration — now shipping to anyone that wants to buy one for a few grand.

The Windows VR headsets aren’t top of the line by any means in general, but they certainly get the job done as affordable entry points into a growing ecosystem with blockbuster titles like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and Half-Life: Alyx (to name just two from this year so far) seemingly proving the opposite of Spencer’s argument. On top of all that you’ve got the Oculus Quest, a breakout success for standalone wireless VR, and the PSVR, Sony’s flagship immersive headset that sits as the market leader with millions of headsets sold and a stellar lineup of platform exclusives.

If “nobody’s asking for VR” as Spencer says, who is buying all of these VR headsets and VR games?

facebook gaming purple background logo

Microsoft’s Partnership With Facebook Gaming

Earlier this week Microsoft announced the decision to shut down its livestreaming platform, Mixer. The service was positioned as a direct competitor to Twitch featuring livestreaming channels and internet personalities playing a wide variety of video games. Big name streamers, like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins even signed multi-million dollar exclusivity deals with Microsoft to stream on Mixer, leaving Twitch behind, very recently. That all seems to have been a waste of money.

Along with the Mixer news came the news that Microsoft will instead partner with Facebook Gaming, a hybrid brand from Facebook that encompasses not only livestreaming and traditional video games, but also mobile-focused casual games you can play within Facebook Messenger with friends or in the mobile app. Microsoft plans to use this partnership to replace the absence of Mixer and to bolster Project xCloud, its cloud-based game streaming service that is positioned in opposition to Google Stadia and PS Now.

The implications this partnership could have for cloud gaming are quite large — two of the largest tech companies on the planet have entered into a partnership, which is quite surprising. But it’s far more exciting to think about what it could mean for Xbox VR.

project scorpio e3 xbox

Why Now Is The Time To Finally Keep The Xbox VR Promise

If you owned an Oculus Rift back when it first launched in 2016, you might remember that Oculus Touch wasn’t out yet. That’s right: the original Rift launched without any motion controllers. The only tracked thing in that box was the headset itself using a single camera.

Instead, right alongside the headset and single camera, your box included an actual, official Xbox One controller.

It seems weird now because that relationship never flourished further, but the groundwork seems to have at least partially been laid half a decade ago for Xbox VR to happen.

Now with the Xbox Series X on the horizon, it seems like the perfect time to rekindle that relationship. By aligning with Facebook Gaming for streaming and cloud gaming, the door is now open to foster a partnership between Oculus and Microsoft to get Oculus headsets working with Xbox.

Microsoft hasn’t added support for their own VR headsets, but since the Xbox Series X is extremely capable out of the box, adding support for the Rift S or Quest — two headsets that are tracked via inside-out sensors built into the headset — seems like an excellent middle ground.

I reached out to both Xbox PR and Oculus PR to ask for comment on this concept, but didn’t receive anything useful. They’re staying tight-lipped if that’s the play.

Now is the time. Xbox has a stable of studios in their pocket right now, some of which have VR experience already like Ninja Theory and inXile, that could knock it out of the park with the power of an Xbox VR platform.

Phil Spencer Xbox One X

Innovating in the gaming space comes down to taking risks and backing bold ideas, not playing it safe. I’m fairly certain no one was “asking for” Xbox Live prior to the original Xbox, but Microsoft changed gaming forever anyway.

You need to read the room to gauge the direction the industry is slowly shifting. Perhaps the issue at hand here isn’t that nobody’s asking for VR, but that nobody’s listening.

What do you think about Xbox and its position with VR? Will Microsoft add VR support to the Xbox Series X? Let us know down in the comments below!

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Editorial: Xbox One Series X Specs Can Clearly Support High-Powered VR – So It Should

This week, Microsoft revealed the basic specifications of its upcoming Xbox Series X console, and they show it’s more than powerful enough to support high end VR.

This is despite the fact that Microsoft has made clear that it has no current plans for VR on Xbox. A few weeks ago, UploadVR’s Jamie Feltham argued that Series X doesn’t need VR support. Now that these specs are known, I’d argue quite the opposite.

12 Teraflop Monster

  • GPU: 12 TFLOPS, AMD RDNA 2 architecture (used for AMD’s upcoming 2020 cards)
  • CPU: AMD’s latest Zen 2 architecture (used for PC Ryzen 3000 series)

Microsoft also revealed some important features the GPU supports:

  • Variable Rate Shading (allows different parts of the screen or different objects to be rendered at different resolutions)
  • Hardware Accelerated Raytracing (like NVIDIA RTX, this enables significantly more realistic lighting)
  • 120Hz Support
  • HDMI 2.1 w/ Variable Refresh Rate

12 teraflops means the Series X is by far the most powerful console ever announced. For comparison, the Xbox One S GPU is around 1.4 TFLOPS and the Xbox Series X GPU around 6 TFLOPS.

Xbox Series X Specs

Sony’s PS4 Pro, which already supports virtual reality well, clocks in at 4.2 TFLOPs. The PlayStation 5 is rumored to hit 9.2 TFLOPS, but this is unconfirmed.

Variable Rate Shading support means this new Xbox could technically even support next generation VR headsets which use foveated rendering to achieve much higher resolution and field of view.

Microsoft: No Plans For Xbox VR

Somewhat ironically, despite headlining its blog post, “What You Can Expect From the Next Generation of Gaming”, Microsoft made no mention of virtual reality.

As early as November of last year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer suggested the next Xbox supporting virtual reality would be unlikely, claiming “nobody’s asking for VR”.

Earlier this month Spencer seemed to walk back these comments slightly, but was still clear that the console won’t support VR at launch and suggested that Microsoft isn’t even working on it yet. Previous reports suggest Microsoft shelved VR support for its Xbox One X console, which it first publicly announced as a VR-capable machine.

With such powerful hardware in a mass market consumer package, this would be a huge missed opportunity for both Microsoft and the VR industry if it never came to pass.

PlayStation VR: No Competition?

If nothing else, Xbox VR would be a way to keep customers who might choose PlayStation 5 over Series X because PS5 supports VR (both the current PSVR headset and an unannounced future successor).

Microsoft no longer discloses sales figures for Xbox, but estimates put it at around 50 million units. Even Sony’s first generation PlayStation VR, with repurposed Move controllers, a wire, and front-facing tracking sold 5 million, 10% of this.

Surely Microsoft can see that lower cost wireless headset with inside-out tracking could make VR a significant percentage of console gaming?

Facebook/Valve Partnership?

If Microsoft doesn’t see the value in investing the resources to build an Xbox VR platform, it’s puzzling why the company doesn’t simply partner with an existing PC VR platform.

Xbox consoles essentially run a modified version of the Windows operating system, using the same DirectX graphics API. Long gone are the days when consoles used exotic architectures or custom compute flows- the Series X CPU and GPU are very similar to what a PC gamer building a rig later this year might put together.

In this age of cross-platform play, where a gamer can sign into Xbox Live in a PlayStation 4 game or invite Steam friends to play a Microsoft Studios game, surely the new Microsoft, a company built on lucrative partnerships, would consider talking to Facebook and/or Valve?

Black Friday headsets quest psvr index

The Oculus Rift and SteamVR platforms are relatively mature, already work on Windows 10, and each company would likely jump at the chance to expand their market. Adding Win32 support and the necessary APIs to Xbox could allow either of these platforms to run on the Xbox console.

Just like with the MP3 player and smartphone however, Microsoft may once again be falling back on its corporate culture of playing it safe until it’s too late. If Sony invests heavily in PlayStation 5 VR and releases an affordable wireless headset, Microsoft may once again find itself scrambling to catch up.

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Editorial: Xbox Doesn’t Need A VR Headset Just Yet, But It Soon Will

Poor Phil Spencer; no one wants him to like VR. Every time Microsoft’s Xbox guru opens his mouth to explain his stance on the technology, only the negative points seem to make the headlines, even when he’s trying to clarify any misunderstanding around previous pessimism.

Even this week’s comments, in which Spencer tried to plainly explain Xbox’s thinking around VR and its understandable-yet-frustrating patience with the technology, resulted in some ugly takes. Call me a turncoat, but I do sympathize with him. Not because he’s often taken out of context on the subject, but because I agree with him.

Microsoft could release an amazing VR headset for its Xbox Series X console, of that I have no doubt. The company has previous iterations to build off of and the library of quality of VR content is slowly but surely growing into a worthwhile proposition (no doubt set to be greatly bolstered by next month’s release of Half-Life: Alyx). But it is also true that Xbox’s vision for the future of gaming — and to put the brand back on top of the industry wars — has filled its plate with enough short and long-term goals, with little room left for VR on the side. That’s a meal unto itself.

The future of Xbox is the incredible value in its Games Pass line-up, the accessibility of its Project Xcloud streaming platform, and a careful balancing act of multiple tiers of console that, presumably, will range from an affordable 4K console for the masses and a more demanding machine for enthusiasts wanting to inspect every blade of grass and water droplet falling from the sky. Though there’s a lot of risk involved with taking these chances, collectively they paint an optimistic picture of greater accessibility in an industry that struggled to expand its demographics in the past few decades.

VR threatens to throw an awkward wrench into that multitude of focuses. The question of when traditional game streaming, for example, will be good enough for prime time remains unanswered even after the release of Google’s Stadia platform. Adding VR on top of that requires performance even beyond the base standards we’d expect now.

What, too, would become of VR on two tiers of Xbox consoles? The gap between the base PS4 and PS4 Pro is often a pain point for developers, with the latter far more capable of maintaining the quality of the original PC titles. Would we see another generation of held-back games suffering from release parity clauses across consoles?

No doubt, there is uncertainty ahead for Microsoft’s gaming business. Especially as it finds itself on the back foot at the tail end of a console generation. Its mission to reverse fortunes is one of brute force ambition, but the uncertain waters of VR might prove a little too stormy for this experimental phase.

Microsoft can operate comfortably in the knowledge that Sony, Facebook and Valve will keep VR in its increasingly healthy incubation stage until it is ready to go a step further. Until then, what is there to really be gained from jumping into the game this early? Certainly not much money, and the lessons VR is learning are very public. Quest’s standalone nature shows that wires and external trackers need to go; two things that Microsoft itself already knows.

Not to mention that Xbox, as a brand, has a history of biding its time. Microsoft didn’t jump into the console business until Nintendo and Sony were on their second 3D gaming machines. True, there was some catch up to play in the first generation of Xbox but the follow-up 360 console saw it comfortably lead in front of Sony for a good portion of that generation.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar situation here. Let PSVR and Quest continue to work out VR’s kinks and then, when a path to explosive profit is clear, come out swinging with, say, a full Halo VR game. make it a headset that supports both Xbox One Series X and PCs. Microsoft owns studios with VR expertise already; it wouldn’t take too long to establish an enviable stable of games to compete with Sony and Facebook. It may not have left the gates yet, but Microsoft’s horse is still very much in this race.

All that is too say that I’m confident Xbox VR will still happen and that Microsoft is shrewd not to be gunning for it too early. In early 2020, it seems quite sure that VR isn’t going anywhere, at least for the next few years. If the industry manages to make it beyond that goal? That’s when Phil Spencer needs to change tact.

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Community Download: When Will VR Be Big Enough For Xbox?

Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today, we want to hear from you in regards to Microsoft’s current stance on VR, specifically with regard to Xbox.

During a recent podcast interview Microsoft Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, elaborated on his prior comments last year in which he stated “nobody” was asking for VR support on Xbox. In this latest interview, he went on to explain that it is essentially just not big enough yet and that he hopes it grows to the point of being a “no brainer” for them, but it’s not in the “equation” right now. You can check out the full interview here with Gamertag Radio.

With Sony continuing to push forward with VR as we approach the launch of the PS5 on the back of the relative success of the original PSVR, as well as other big players in the market such as Facebook’s Oculus, Valve, HTC, Pimax, and others, the VR industry is certainly in a position to keep growing. But Microsoft doesn’t seem to agree right now as demonstrated by the backtracking on promised support for the Xbox One X and the relative lackluster debut of Windows Mixed Reality headsets in recent years.

So, the question at hand is: When exactly will VR be big enough for Xbox (and Microsoft) to start actually caring? Does that happen by the end of 2020, or 2021? Or will it be even longer than that?

Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

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