Xbox boss talks Scorpio, and the 'next [Xbox] console'

We're getting some more insight into the future of Xbox from the head of Xbox himself, Phil Spencer, where he said during an interview with Game Informer that the PC version of Battlefield 1 was the best-looking version of the game.

During the interview, Spencer was asked about his comments during E3 2016 where he used the phrase "gaming beyond generations", with Game Informer asking: "Does this mean that in the future, console gamers will need to buy hardware more regularly if they want to play the best possible version of a game?"

Spencer replied: "It's hard to tell. Clearly in the case of Xbox One, Xbox One S and Scorpio, the answer would be, I don't know if it's more regularly, but you're going to want Scorpio to run the game at the highest resolution or framerate - whatever the developers decide to do with that game".

He continued:

As for the "more regularly" part, to be completely honest, I don't know what the next console is past Scorpio. We're thinking about it. We're looking at consumer trends and what the right performance spec and price would be, and [asking ourselves], "Can we hit something that has a meaningful performance characteristic that a gamer would care about?"

I don't have this desire to every two years have a new console on the shelf; that's not part of the console business model, and it doesn't actually help us. The best customer I have is somebody who buys the original Xbox and just buys all the games. That's the best customer for us in terms of the pure financials of it. I don't have a need to get you to go buy the newest console, or I don't have the need to create an artificial loop of, "Here's a new console every two years," in order to get you to go buy.

The reason I hesitate to say yes to your question in terms of the future is, I don't know what the next thing is past Scorpio right now... I'm not trying to turn consoles into the graphics card market where every so often NVIDIA or AMD come out with a new card, and if I want a little bit more performance I'm going to go buy that new card. I think for consoles it's different. I think you have to hit a spec that actually means something in an ecosystem of televisions and games.