Executive vice-president of Gaming at Microsoft, Phil Spencer explains the name behind their next-generation console, the Xbox Series X, which was revealed at this month’s The Game Awards.

By now many of you have heard that the next-generation Xbox will simply be called, well Xbox with the “Series X” name meaning hinting at multiple iterations. This sparked much confusion among many, including ourselves, though Phil recently spoke in an interview o  the Xbox End of the Year podcast to try and clarify the reason behind the Xbox name and how it all ties in with past generation Xboxes.

Could we make games run better that had been built for one spec of console on a new spec. Console games are written to a very specific console

So this was hey, we’re gonna go to try to make these games run better. We’re gonna try to make the 360 games run better, the original Xbox one games run better. We knew we wouldn’t get all of them, but I loved the fact that was part of the journey. Could we make games run better that were written for a different version of this console, and that continues today. One of the things we look at with Xbox Series X is that we want this to be the best place to play. And the reason we call it Xbox is because it’s going to be the best place to play your Xbox games. Your going to have amazing series games that take the full power of series X, but your also gonna have some games that were written generations before, and we want those to run incredibly well.

And that journey was a difficult one, that we said internally we were gonna do this. PC had done this for a long time, but for consoles this is new. We’re all part of this journey we are on to the point of where we are today where we can launch a console that we think will absolutely be the best Xbox that anybody has ever seen.

And there you have it, hopefully, this cleared up some of the confusion behind the decision for the name. Having said that, it might be more confusing to some since people will just refer to it as “Xbox” or you’ll need to mention which Xbox iteration it is. As to how Microsoft plans on marketing the console is yet to be seen.

It’s going to be a very interesting year as we head into 2020, and by this time next year the new Xbox will be available in homes, along with the PlayStation 5. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on any new next-gen development as they get revealed.