You might get other game stores on Xbox Series X Pro

In a new interview, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has claimed that he'd like to see more storefronts on Xbox hardware in the future.

Reiterating Xbox's apparent commitment to open platforms and not monopolising its hardware, he told Polygon that he would be interested in letting the likes of Epic Games Store and Itch.io onto Xbox as stores.

Spencer said that people should consider "our history as the Windows company. Nobody would blink twice if I said, 'Hey, when you’re using a PC, you get to decide the type of experience you have'. There’s real value in that."

Given that Epic is currently trying to release its own game store onto iOS after a protracted battle with Apple to earn that right, it's likely that it would see the value in that arrangement, for one. 

Spencer also indicated that the hardware market is becoming even more challenging for Xbox - sales reports indicate that the Xbox Series X and Series S have been outsold pretty much two-to-one by the PS5 since all the consoles were available. 

He said, "The price of the components of a console aren’t coming down as fast as they have in previous generations" and that this meant that subsidising hardware "becomes more challenging in today’s world. And I will say, and this may seem too altruistic, I don’t know that it’s growing the industry".

So, this all sounds like Spencer continues to believe that the future of Xbox is as an all-platform games hub rather than a hardware maker that has exclusive titles. This has been demonstrated by the recent cross-platform releases of games it published such as Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush. 

Whether this means, in any concrete way, that you can expect to see more than just the Xbox store on an Xbox console at some point soon is less clear. It could be that this happens at some point via a software update once all the ducks are in a row, but it could equally be something that arrives alongside new hardware after all, whether that's an Xbox Series X Pro or something else. 

Until then, though, it slightly boils down to big promises that we'll have to wait to see if Xbox actually delivers on.