I've observed the exact opposite of what is stated here: as game technology has become more advanced, innovation and game developers going into "unknown territories" has diminished, not increased. This is because as budgets exploded, "one game makes or breaks our entire studio" strongly disincentivised risk taking. What about the PlayStation 5 would not re-inforce this trend, much less reverse it?

Don't get me wrong: I'm really excited to see "Horizon Zero Dawn 2's" shiny new coat of paint. I love new graphics technology! But I have absolutely zero expectation of games broaching "uknown territories": if anything they'll become even more conservative.

In other gaming news, it takes quite the machete to hack through Phil Spencer's corporate bullshit talk, but the best I can glean is his recognition that some level of cooperation with competitors is good for Microsoft, even if he and his cohorts are making up all of the specific details on the fly as they go. There's just too many contradictions in what he says-- "we need an Xbox" - "consoles aren't where money is made", or "play anywhere drives us" - "but only on Switch, sometimes"-- to think he has some kind of master vision.

I get that on the development side, Microsoft is now a "platform company", versus one that sells boxed copies of Windows and Office. But on the gaming side, they almost sound a little like Sun Microsystems back in the Java days: "take our framework and run your code anywhere!" As the interviewer points out, this is a business, and money needs to be made somehow.