This year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 for the cool kids) may be three months away, but Microsoft's Phil Spencer is already publicly speaking about his company's presentation. According to the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Game Studios, the show will be 90 minutes and have “very few execs”.
This news comes via Spencer's Twitter (via Destructoid). Microsoft's 90 minute conferences were also apparently too crowded and they had to scale some things back to fit the allotted time.
Microsoft has a lot of things to reflect upon at this year's show. For staters, the Xbox One has been in consumer's hands since November. Microsoft needs to drive the fact that Xbox One owners made a good decision to invest in their product, so they're going to have to show and tease a lot of projects.
Phil Spencer On the Possibility of Bringing Early Access to Xbox One, Virtual Reality
In terms of things we already know, this year's Game Developer Conference brought us news on Microsoft's Direct X12, which will potentially improve the Xbox One's performance. Microsoft will have to give consumers the run-down of this technology in layman's terms for the average Joes out there.
We also know that Phil Spencer hopes to see a form of Early Access on Xbox One: a system where in-development games can be launched on the console and purchased by consumers. Steam's Early Access allows for developers to release their games, good or bad, on the platform, effectively selling a game that's in-development.
DayZ and Rust are two popular titles in Early Access that have both mode a lot of money and were directly mentioned by Spencer himself. We know that he would like those two on Xbox, and there's signs that DayZ just might be somewhere down the line.
Last year's Microsoft conference wasn't very interesting. Concerns over the Xbox One's DRM overshadowed their announcements of a new Halo and what Kinect would allow in the living room. With a promise of “very few execs”, we can only hope that Microsoft will be going to this year's show with games, games, and more games. I'd like to see some proper competition come out of them so Sony and Nintendo up their game, as well.