When Microsoft debuted Games for Windows — Live eight years ago, the platform was cheered as a way for the company to use its considerable marketing clout to improve the visibility of PC gaming. Features like Xbox 360 cross-play, voice, and text chat were all touted. GfWL was supposed to serve as the common core for better PC gaming, and it came at a cost: $49.95 a year for PC owners (though Xbox 360 owners who already had Gold memberships received GfWL for free). The service was controversial from the beginning, and quickly established a reputation for being hard to use, flaky, and unpopular. In recent comments, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer acknowledged these issues, but reiterated that Microsoft wants to win back gamers’ trust.

In an interview with Gamesradar, Spencer claims to embrace the skepticism PC users might feel towards Microsoft on this front, saying, “When I stand there talking about it, I’m not showing any fancy videos. I’m not trying to pizzazz you with anything other than ‘Here’s where we are; here’s what we’re trying to do.’ And the SDKs are available now.”

The obvious question is whether Microsoft can make substantial inroads in gaming against the other 800-pound gorilla in the room: Steam. Flash back to 2007, and Steam is a vastly different beast — PC gaming had a much larger brick-and-mortar distribution system than it does today, and Steam was a fraction of its current size. Today, however, Steam owns the majority of the PC gaming market, but not all of it. Competing services from EA and Ubisoft have gained traction simply by refusing to offer their own products over Steam.

Spencer seems to envision such a future, though he tries to minimize any potential conflict. “If you’re an Xbox developer, there are some tools that we’re providing that allow you to seamlessly move from Xbox to PC – Xbox Live and the Universal App Platform will be helpful for those guys,” he said. This, I think, is at the root of Gabe’s push into Linux and the entire concept of a Steam Machine. Microsoft is beginning to wake up to the idea that it could exploit its position in the gaming market and tie PC and Xbox together into a single unified platform.

Virtual Reality and Kinect

Spencer goes on to say that Microsoft isn’t focused on offering a VR product at the moment, though it continues to talk to other vendors about how to offer VR content like Minecraft for third-party devices. Strictly from a hardware perspective, this makes perfect sense. The recent published specs for the Oculus Rift make it clear that the device is going to require some significant hardware to function well. Sony can talk about building Project Morpheus for the PS4, but it’s unlikely that the upcoming headset will match Oculus’s visual quality — not if the entire system is driven by the midrange Radeon and octa-core Jaguar configuration inside that console. The Xbox One, with even fewer GPU resources, would face a steeper uphill climb.

Peripherals like HoloLens are still being discussed for potential Xbox One integration. Spencer was quick to declare that Kinect isn’t dead, though it’s difficult to see how that’s not the case. Microsoft can make mouth noises about the platform’s long-term potential and the value of giving consumers a choice over whether to buy the hardware, but there’s a hard fact underlying all the pretty words: Making a Kinect-enabled game required a great deal of attention to the capabilities of the platform. Patching in support for a handful of motions or voice commands was much easier for developers, but it kept the peripheral strictly in “optional” territory.

Now that gamers have overwhelmingly chosen to buy Kinect-less systems, there’s no value in building titles that specifically leverage the hardware — you’d be limiting yourself to a fraction of the Xbox One’s total install base. Of all the features that might drive Xbox One forward or create cross-platform buzz, Kinect isn’t going to be one of them.