Phil Spencer: Xbox Series X not held back by Xbox One

As you might know, Microsoft will at least initially release its upcoming first-party games for both Xbox Series X and Xbox One. Some people have worried that this will somehow hold the games back and make them less visually stunning.

Quite unsurprisingly, the Xbox boss Phil Spencer doesn't think so, and in an interview with Games Industry, he explains why:

"Frankly, held back is a meme that gets created by people who are too caught up in device competition. I just look at Windows. It's almost certain if the developer is building a Windows version of their game, then the most powerful and highest fidelity version is the PC version. You can even see that with some of our first-party console games going to PC, even from our competitors, that the richest version is the PC version. Yet the PC ecosystem is the most diverse when it comes to hardware, when you think about the CPUs and GPUs from years ago that are there.

Yes, every developer is going to find a line and say that this is the hardware that I am going to support, but the diversity of hardware choice in PC has not held back the highest fidelity PC games on the market. The highest fidelity PC games rival anything that anybody has ever seen in video games. So this idea that developers don't know how to build games, or game engines, or ecosystems, that work across a set of hardware... there's a proof point in PC that shows that's not the case."

We'll see if Spencer is right when the Xbox Series X launches later this fall. Do you think he makes a valid point?