Xbox Play Anywhere: Xbox’s Phil Spencer says new Surface Books will have no trouble running cross-platform games

Sitting down with Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, I laid it out: I’m a Microsoft nut. I have a 290,000 gamerscore and log some serious hours on my Xbox One. That said, my NVidia GPU-equipped Surface Book struggles to run Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on the lowest of settings (see below), let alone new games like Forza Horizon III or Gears of War 4. Surely Microsoft doesn’t expect me to buy a high-end gaming PC on top of the already pricey Surface Book to get my fix on PC?

“I think you point out something really interesting on the Surface, and [Surface boss] Panos [Panay] and I have talked about this a lot,” Spencer said. “How do we make sure that our Surface line and our game portfolio match so that when our games come out we know Surface is a great PC for that?

“It doesn’t mean that Alienware is not great and Razer is not great, but making sure that our first-party hardware line [is important]. The devices team — Panos’ team — came into the same organization that we’re in kind of late last year, so we’re still working through some of the machines that have been out for a while.

“The dedicated GPU Surface books will run the games fine. The Surface Books without a dedicated GPU, some of them will do okay, some depending on the game and the settings that you put into the game.

“Definitely, it’s a smart thing to point out in the long run,” he asserted. “We want to make sure our first-party PC hardware is good for running our games.”

Since the chat, Microsoft has indeed revealed a new line of Surface Books with meatier specs than last time. In Australia, the beefiest option sports a 1TB hard drive, Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB/dGPU. It also costs a whopping $5,199 AUD.

Microsoft’s next big challenge, it seems, is to get Gears running on my Microsoft Band.

Stay tuned for more with Spencer in the coming weeks, and read past chats here.