Xbox Head Wants to Launch a Netflix for Games

Head of Xbox Phil Spencer is gearing up for his console’s showing at this year’s E3 in June – where the first public unveiling of Xbox hardware refresh Project Scorpio is expected to occur – and he’s hinted to The Guardian that Microsoft could use the event to launch a new Netflix for games service. In an exclusive interview with the UK newspaper, Spencer revealed that such a service could offer narrative game content, which, with the likes of Telltale’s The Walking Dead and Dontnod’s Life is Strange, is becoming increasingly episode-based.

“I’ve looked at things like Netflix and HBO, where great content has been created because there’s this subscription model,” Spencer said. “Shannon Loftis and I are thinking a lot about, well, could we put story-based games into the Xbox Game Pass business model because you have a subscription going? It would mean you wouldn’t have to deliver the whole game in one month; you could develop and deliver the game as it goes.”

Another idea floated by Spencer during the interview was the potential to utilise Microsoft’s Azure cloud servers as a means of hosting service-based games from smaller developers – such as DayZ or Rust – in an attempt to help minimise the cost of setting up such an infrastructure.

“They don’t have to go buy a bunch of servers on their own and stick them under their desks and hope they get enough players to pay for them,” he explained. “We can build on the elastic scalability of our platform. From a reliability standpoint, from what the latency looks like, this has been a big part of the investment that we’ve made in our server-based side. We’ve talked a lot in the press about the consumer side of Xbox Live with Arena and Clubs, and other things that we’ve done to innovate. There’s a whole developer side of that, which you’re gonna hear more from us.”

Between this and Xbox Game Pass, expect to see a lot more subscription-based gaming from Microsoft at E3 2017.

Image courtesy of BagoGames.