Phil Spencer 'excited' about Xbox PC handheld, cloud growing 'dramatically'

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer once again mentions his excitement for handhelds, and drops a surprising factoid on Xbox's ever-growing cloud gaming business.

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In a recent interview with iJustine, Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer briefly reiterated Microsoft's core game plan for interactive entertainment: Games everywhere, for everyone, at any time.

In the interview, Spencer said that it was the consumer that was at the center of the products and services, not the other way around. This means delivering content and services on devices that people already own--or maybe newer ones introduced in a nascent hardware market. ASUS and Microsoft have teamed up to make what's believed to be an Xbox-themed PC handheld, but the device hasn't been revealed yet. It will be a Windows 11 device and not an "Xbox handheld" that runs native Xbox console versions of games.

We also get a quick update on Xbox Cloud Gaming numbers; Spencer says tens of millions of hours of gameplay are streamed from Microsoft servers to gamers across the globe every month.

Check below for a quick transcript:

I really love the work that the team did around putting Xbox everywhere and our marketing campaign around that. We always tend to just follow what we see, where we see people playing.

It's just been amazing to see the number of people now that are playing Xbox via cloud. It's literally tens of millions of hours every single month and growing dramatically, people who play.

Obviously, people finding Xbox on PC, and we have a lot of work to do there.

We've teased and talked about handhelds, and I'm very excited, because we both travel some. Yes. And sometimes you can't always take your console or my whole gaming desktop with me.

But it is really around building the experience around the person. And that's the part that gets me most excited, is putting this not a single device at the center. It's not one game. It is the player at the center, and make sure all of your games are available, all of your saved games, all of your entitlements are available wherever you go, so that gaming can just continue.

Interactive entertainment gaming can continue to grow as a form of entertainment.