Xbox have made a lot of noise about Play Anywhere in the last year, which is their named initiative to persuade developers to provide gamers with not just an Xbox copy of a game, but one that will work on their PC too – with a single purchase.
Uptake on this feature has become more and more popular, with many large studios jumping on board. Now, thanks to a little datapoint shared by Xbox President Sarah Bond in a new interview, we may no a little more as to why. According to Sarah, Play Anywhere users spend ‘20% more time’ playing games
It’s a wide-ranging interview that covers plenty of Xbox President Sarah Bond’s early days at McKinsey and T-Mobile, why she worked in consulting and how she ended up at Xbox. When asked by Ruth about the ‘resistance’ that comes along with these new changes, Sarah shared a fair amount of the detail that Xbox looks at as it balances the needs of the business and the desires of fans.
Sarah was asked by Ruth – “How do you foster continued innovation without losing focus on what Xbox truly is?”
Sarah replied, saying “”Xbox is really all about making it easy for people to access and play their games. Like, we know that’s what players care about. And so all of this innovation, all of the things that are happening in the industry, they are being harnessed to enable that more easily and more accessibly for customers than ever before. A good example actually is if you look back at the history of the industry, it used to be that if you bought a game on the console, you could only play that game on the console. And if you wanted to play it on a PC, you had to buy it again on a PC, and you couldn’t even access it on a mobile device.“
She continued, “And that’s actually how the industry grew up. And what we’ve seen is a good example of the change that you’re talking about is more and more people are playing their games across multiple devices. That people want gaming to act like all forms of entertainment act, where you could actually pick up, you can instantly go and you can move across. Another example is, is that people, you know, if you’ve got a friend who’s playing on PC and you’re playing on an Xbox, you wanna be able to play with that person. You wanna be able to seamlessly jump in and experience the same experience with them at the exact same time. All of these things are potential disruptions.“
One interesting data point she brought up was how players engage with Xbox Play Anywhere titles, something the Xbox team have been making a lot of noise about.
Per Sarah Bond – “So XPA, (Xbox Play Anywhere) is actually very good example of one where we actually looked at the player behavior or people who were playing XPA games, we saw they were playing 20% more time, right? So based off of that, we started to invest more in XPA, amplifying the catalog, bringing them more things.”
Indeed, the upcoming Partner Preview later this week mentions specifically that “all the games featured during Xbox Partner Preview are Xbox Play Anywhere, which means you can enjoy every single one of them across console, PC and supported gaming handhelds with just one copy of the game.“
I know from my own experience that I predominantly play Xbox Play Anywhere games, so it’s interesting to hear that I’m perhaps not alone in that!
Is Play Anywhere important to you? Let us know in the XboxEra Forums or make some noise in the lively XboxEra Community Discord Server. If you’re looking to be a bigger part of an amazing community, then either choice is a good one!
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