Microsoft has the biggest booth at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year, and has just announced very exciting news for developers: it will allow them to take Xbox Live games into Windows 10, the next version of its operating system. Capitalising in the strength of the Xbox brand is a smart choice for Microsoft, which is trying to be more relevant in a 'mobile first' world.
"Our goal is to allow people to play games wherever they are", Xbox head Phil Spencer said in Microsoft's session at GDC, in San Francisco. "We know billions of people play games across multiple devices," he added, sharing his vision for the next step of Xbox games: consumers moving from screen to screen and being able to play games wherever they want to.
That is happening in the near future. The Xbox Live SDK for Windows 10 will be released into the developer community shortly, and the company also plans to open up the Xbox One platform to all developers, regardless of their size. What this means for gamers is more quantity and variety of titles to choose from.
As Microsoft brings Xbox and Windows closer together, it will also allow gamers to enjoy whatever they buy on both platforms; it's the cross-buy solution. "One of the features that can be unique for us is the ability for people to buy consumables in one platform and enjoy it across the device spectrum," Spencer noted. With cross-buy, consumers will only purchase content once and play it on the Xbox One and Windows 10 devices.
Another big thing from GDC's session is the Windows Universal App Platform. Microsoft wants developers to be able to create apps that will run seamlessly in any Windows device, without having to work on different versions to address different screen sizes, resolution, or operating system version. "Windows 10 brings together one core operating system, one application platform, one gaming social network, one store, and one ingestion path across all Windows PCs, tablets, phones and Xbox One consoles - that's more than 1.5 billion people", Microsoft wrote in a post after the session.
And that means Xbox games will come to HoloLens, the holographic futuristic device Microsoft announced in January and plans to release around October, at the same time of the new Windows 10.