Xbox Chief Phil Spencer Talks Project Scorpio, VR, and Those Magical 6 Teraflops

At E3 this week, Microsoft is trying to change the way we think about game consoles. If you bought an Xbox 360 at launch, you spent a long time—eight years!—without any sort of graphical upgrade. That's not the case this generation: If you want HDR-enhanced game graphics and 4K Blu-ray playback, you can buy the Xbox One S this year. You could also hold off until the 2017 holiday season in order to buy what’s currently code-named “Project Scorpio,” a more powerful version of the console that's designed to melt your eyeballs with 4K gaming as well as high-end VR.

But what if you’re not ready to upgrade at all? Still fine, says the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer: “We’re going to have versions of those games that will work on Xbox One and Xbox One S, as well as supporting Scorpio.” Microsoft may be speeding up the console cycle, but it’s also making it okay to upgrade on your own time. WIRED spoke with Spencer following the Xbox E3 briefing on Monday afternoon to find out more about Xbox’s plans for Project Scorpio and beyond, and where VR fits into the picture.

More E3 CoverageWatch the Xbox E3 2016 Conference Right HereArrowA PlayStation 4 Upgrade Is Coming, But You Won’t See It at E3ArrowLike It or Not, the Future of E3 Is Doritos’ 6-Story Arcade GameArrow

While consoles have traditionally never chased the ever-iterating world of PC gaming, Scorpio is a step in that direction: Delivering 4K graphics, to match what high-end gaming PCs can already deliver, is the new box's raison d'etre. After all, Spencer says, developers are usually building a PC version of any given game alongside the Xbox version---and increasingly, that means a 4K version. "When we started looking at Scorpio," he says, "we asked the partners, 'in order to build a true high-fidelity 4K game, what capabilities do you need?' That’s what we designed Scorpio around. It’s kind of like a [GeForce GTX] 980 card on the PC. I get the capability that I need as a developer to deliver a high-fidelity 4K game. ”

Since developers are already used to creating PC games that run on machines with vastly different hardware specs, Spencer doesn’t anticipate that it will be an issue to get them to create Xbox games that run across differently-powered consoles. “The capability to build a game that actually takes advantage of different hardware capabilities is part of any third-party dev ecosystem, or anybody who’s targeting Windows and console at the same time,” he says.

But just because Microsoft is pushing ahead with a new console so soon doesn’t mean it plans to release them at a faster pace forever. “Consumer expectation is that, if you wanted to, you could go buy a new cell phone every year. I don’t want to get into that mode with a console,” Spencer says. “I see the next inflection point as 4K, and I want to make sure we have a console there to support that, and Scorpio will do that. We’re not on a hardware tick-tock that says I need to put out a console every two years or every one year to get people to upgrade. That’s not the console model.”