Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox, has been given a nice big advert interview on BBC News to talk about the Xbox Disc to Digital feature and the next Xbox.
“I know players love physical media, and I know there’s a lot of benefits in digital media, and I want to make sure people have a choice,” Sharma told the BBC. “There are stacks of games on everybody’s shelves,” she claimed.
I have just checked, my stack of PS5 physical games consists of three – yes, three – boxes. A veritable tower of physical games! “Everybody” has stacks of games!
Anyway, we shall ignore half of the ‘news’ story that waffles on about disc-to-digital as the BBC did bother to ask her about the next Xbox.
“This next generation, we have to be thinking about efficiency and affordability alongside performance,” she replied, adding, “As an industry, we’re in the middle of ‘Rampocalypse,” Sharma said, ignoring the fact that Microsoft are very much part of the reason why there is a Rampocalypse.
“All of the industry needs to start to innovate on affordability and efficiency. That is something that we have not had to do [previously].”
“But with the crisis that’s currently happening in hardware and components, it is absolutely something all of us need to be thinking about and innovating on and giving people more choice in terms of how they play their console and how they purchase their console,” she states,
That’s a very specific answer, in particular the reference to how people buy their next console. Perhaps Xbox is going to arrange a finance deal where you can pay for your next Xbox over a period of time rather than all at once?
She also states that they will have to think about “hardware efficiency in terms of how you use storage and memory, the kind of price per unit, the components, things like that”.
Ark: Survival Evolved and COD Modern Warfare 3 can take over 300GB, with most AAA games clocking in well over 100Gb. With storage in short supply, could the size of games be limited?
Source: BBC
