In a wide ranging Interview with Polygon Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer covered a wide range of topics, including exclusives, lack of growth and perhaps most interestingly, opening up the “walled gardens” of the Xbox ecosystem to allow other stores (ie Epic) to sell on the platform.

When asked about if he could see other storefronts on Xbox Spencer replied:

“Yes,Consider our history as the Windows company. Nobody would blink twice if I said, ‘Hey, when you’re using a PC, you get to decide the type of experience you have [by picking where to buy games]. There’s real value in that.”

Spencer believes that the console market isn’t growing while the PC market is in large part due to the fact that the PC market gives you multiple storefronts in which to buy from.

He also mentions how exclusives are becoming more and more of a problem with rising costs of game development. When games now need to sell millions of copies to make a profit being exclusive limits those sales.

While it remains to be seen if this new direction for the Xbox brand is a good or bad one (I for one think it’s more bad than good) you have to at least give Phil credit for attempting something different to change their fortunes