While Microsoft might have hoped that its free-to-play PC version of Forza would grab headlines, its press showcase in San Francisco was far more notable for Xbox chief Phil Spencer's strong hint that the Xbox One's hardware will be upgraded.

After neglecting the PC gaming market for several years, it sounds like Microsoft may now go much further than merely throwing the likes of Quantum Break and Gears of War onto the platform. Microsoft may be trying to apply the whole concept of PC gaming—that is, extremely wide backwards compatibility along with various hardware configurations—onto the appliance-like console market.

"Consoles lock the hardware and the software platforms together at the beginning of the generation. Then you ride the generation out for seven or so years, while other ecosystems are getting better, faster, stronger," Spencer said. "When you look at the console space, I believe we will see more hardware innovation in the console space than we've ever seen. You'll actually see us come out with new hardware capability during a generation allowing the same games to run backward and forward compatible because we have a Universal Windows Application running on top of the Universal Windows Platform."

What form these console upgrades might take isn't clear, but beefier processing and graphics power may be in the works: "We can effectively feel a little bit more like we see on PC," said Spencer, "where I can still go back and run my old Doom and Quake games that I used to play years ago but I can still see the best 4K games come out and my library is always with me."

On the face of it, this is a radical departure from how consoles are sold. Typically, Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo release a console with fixed hardware. Initially, developers are terrible at making games for that hardware—the PlayStation 3 suffered greatly from this problem thanks to its quirky Cell processor—but as the years tick by, they get better, and so too do the games they produce. This only works because developers have a fixed hardware spec that they can reliably optimise for. If you move the goalposts this becomes a lot more difficult to do.

What's changed is that both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are, essentially, just PCs (or more accurately, laptops without the screen). They both have a very similar AMD x86 processor—the origins of which stretch all the way back to the late 1970s—that's typically seen in laptops, along with an on-die AMD GPU. The PlayStation's large unified pool of fast GDDR5 memory differs from the Xbox One's more traditional DDR3 setup—not to mention their respective operating systems and programming tools—but their underlying hardware is eerily similar.

Given the struggles that developers had making games for the PS3, as well as Microsoft's grand plan to shove Windows onto everything, the move to more familiar x86 hardware was inevitable. It also comes with the added benefit of a strong supply of new hardware, thanks to Intel, Nvidia, and AMD churning out new chips every year. And now, with its Universal Windows Platform and apps stretching across Xbox One, PC, and mobile, Microsoft has finally given developers a way to somewhat easily throw a game out onto multiple platforms at once, even if there are a few teething problems on the PC side.













This combination of cross-platform programming tools and familiar hardware is the key to Microsoft's Xbox upgrade plans. After all, if you're developing for the wacky world of mismatched PC hardware anyway, what difference does it make if there's an Xbox or two out there with a slightly better CPU or GPU? The advent of low-level APIs like DirectX 12—which is already on PC and coming to the Xbox One—will help matters too. In theory, the game scales anyway, right?

Here's the thing: while this all well and good in theory, the console's greatest strength for both the consumer and the developer has been its fixed hardware. For the consumer, it means that no matter where they play a particular game—at home on their own console or at a friend's house—that game will run (I'll admit, the advent of day one patches has ruined that one a little), and it'll look just like it does on the back of the box. For the developer, it means that each and every person that plays that game will have the same quality of experience, while also giving them the opportunity to really push the hardware to its limits.

Selling slightly tweaked versions of the Xbox One changes all that. While it's plausible for developers to have games automatically scale to the hardware without the need for PC-style graphics settings—say, if there's a new Xbox One with a better GPU released—what about the consumer confusion this creates? "Why does this game look worse on my Xbox One than my friend's Xbox One?!"

That's not to mention the extra work developers will have to put into ensuring the game works smoothly on all these different Xbox Ones. You only need look at the hardware fragmentation of the Android ecosystem, as well as Apple's struggle to avoid the same performance disparity across its devices, to see where problems will arise.

If anything, Microsoft's plan to allow for hardware upgradability is less like the PC market and more like the mobile market. They both have fixed-hardware devices, and both are aimed squarely at consumers who want an easy-to-use appliance that just works. No doubt Microsoft would love to be able to sell everyone a new, slightly better Xbox One every year, much like the phone guys do (or did, depending on who you talk to). I've no qualms about Microsoft wanting to ensure its games are backward compatible in the future, but there's a huge difference between selling someone a whole new console that works with older games—see the PS2, PS3, Wii, Wii U—and selling them an incremental upgrade.

The obvious jokes about the likes of Sega's failed Mega Drive (Genesis to our US friends) upgrades have been doing the rounds since Microsoft's press showcase. But there is an element of truth to these comparisons. The console market has had a terrible history with upgrades, ranging from the likes of the Family Computer Disk System—which added a floppy disk drive to the Nintendo Famicom in Japan—through to more modern failures like the Nintendo 64's "64DD" drive, and Sega's 32X and Sega CD. You could even argue that Microsoft's Kinect, despite selling millions of units, is a failed upgrade. After all, who the hell is making Kinect games these days?

While consumers may be comfortable with upgrading a phone every year—and at a substantial cost—I don't think they're ready to do the same with their console. And with the cost of games development rising, and the chances of success lowering, developers won't be keen to spend yet more of their precious budget targeting another set of hardware parameters either.

Microsoft's console upgrade plan is certainly bold, and potentially groundbreaking. But the games industry? I'm not sure it's ready for this one just yet.