Head of Xbox Phil Spencer in an interview with IGN Unlocked discussed the Xbox Series X and mentioned the console should still launch in Holiday 2020. However, with the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic it is possible it might get a delay. Spencer says the "safety and security of the teams" is top priority, along with launching a quality product.
"Well, the thing that I will say front and center is the safety and security of the teams and there is no decision that I will make, or frankly anybody at Microsoft would even ask me to make, that would compromise the safety and security of the teams for a near term either financial or product gain. The teams are the most important thing," said Spencer.
"I’d say pragmatically the supply chains in China have started to come back," he continued. "I think we’ve seen that in the news that China was obviously earlier in dealing with C-19 before it spread and I think that we can see in the factories and stuff we’re starting to get reports back from them and that that’s working for us.
"The two big issues we’re kind of monitoring right now, you know, building a video game from home — a large distributed team of hundreds of people is not easy. Video games as we know right now are big and there’s huge massive asset bases that each one of these games have and how you transition I think all those things are…we’re just kind of living.
"On the hardware platform side, I think I made it public when I had my Series X at home and I’m using it for testing. As much as I have a great time doing that, that kind of time with the console is important and we want to make sure that we’ve got the right amount of time for the platform tech that we’re putting in place to get all the testing done so we’ve had to move a lot of that testing in the homes.
"I’d say things right now aren’t easy. I think things are stretched I can feel it in the teams, they’re stretched. We have nothing right now that says we’re not going to make the dates that we’ve been planning, but I’ll also say it, as I said earlier, this is kind of real-time stuff and I’m gonna put the safety and security of the teams at the top along with the quality product. Like, I don’t want to rush a product out if it’s not ready. So, feeling good but also just being eyes wide open."
Phils Spencer was asked if there was an alternative plan if the Xbox Series X ends up getting delayed and he said that as of right now the team hasn't discussed a plan B. He doesn't want to have a staggered launch for the next generation console like with the Xbox One launching many months later in Japan as it did in North America and Europe.
"You know we haven’t really started on any kind of Plan Bs you asked about so I’m hesitant to do kind of what-if on this," said Spencer. "I will say that having lived through the Xbox One launch, I know that significant delays in region launches hurt us. It hurts us with the sentiment of the fans.
"Every time I go to Japan I’m reminded that we were, what was it, nine months late in launching there with Xbox One. And the internet, I mean, everybody knows where everything is launched so it’s not like, you know, thirty years ago when it was kind of it’s just not here yet and you don’t get the roar of people getting excited from other regions.
"So, you know, we haven’t started on that Plan B, but I’d be hesitant to do something like that and fundamentally some of the issues that we have to work through are more software related than hardware and when you’re done with software it kind of scales globally so I’m not predicting that. But you know, I think as I said we’re just managing day-to-day kind of watching how things are going and watching our productivity."
