I'd like to do a quick thread reacting to my interview with @XboxP3. See, I think Phil said A LOT without explicitly saying anything; in other words, you have to read between the lines. It's understandable, as he has to be super careful with his messaging right now. Here goes!

A caveat to this: because he didn't EXPLICITLY say this stuff, these are my interpretations and should not be reported on as fact or taken as gospel. Only Phil's words should be reported on. I reserve the right to be wrong.

The big one: price. I no longer think the Xbox Series X is gonna be $600. I think AT WORST it matches PS5; it may beat it. Phil says he's "staying agile" and has a lot of support from Microsoft leadership. In other words, they're ready to react to Sony:

Price part 2: the "staying agile" on price is probably also related to the global economy, which as we all know is currently not in good shape and may get worse. But either way it sounds like Phil has the green light from Satya Nadella to go at a lower price point if he wants.

Phil, in his very humble way, says he's confident the Xbox is more powerful than PS5: “When we finally saw [the PS5 tech reveal] I felt even better about the choices we made on our platform, and I kind of expected we would.”

He pretty clearly says that, regardless of what hurdles COVID-19 brings, the Xbox Series X launch is going to be a simultaneous global launch, rather than a limited territories launch necessitated by supply issues:

He says that developing the software (i.e. games) from home during this has been challenging for the teams, but that no one game delay, not even Halo, would hold up the hardware launch:

Speaking of games – and this is more reading-between-the-lines on my part – it sounds like we shouldn't expect a huge day-1 launch lineup, but rather Phil is aiming to have a steady flow of Series X games:

I asked about Sunset Overdrive's unfortunate lack of success, and he seemed to take blame for it, seemingly suggesting that it was basically a victim of the Xbox One's bungled first couple of years. He seemed to really feel bad about it:

The optical port has been removed so A) they could spend that money elsewhere and B) because they have data on how many people use it, and they obviously felt like it wasn't enough people to keep it:

It sounds like we shouldn't expect many/any more Xbox games on Nintendo Switch:

Preorders will happen later in the summer, which means we might not learn the price until then because you need the price before the preorders can happen:

He said a lot of interesting things in this interview, and I hope you'll watch/listen to the whole thing if you haven't already. Cheers, friends!