Head of Xbox Phil Spencer announced some major news during the special Inside Xbox livestream today. First of all, Microsoft is bringing back its XO, the series of annual events it used to have in the early days of the Xbox. The next XO event, which will be called XO18 will be held in Mexico City on November 10. Unlike Xbox Fanfest events, XO18 will be live-streamed and everyone will be able to join the fun online. There are not a lot of details about the event yet, but Phil Spencer (who will be in the attendance) promised some news about first-party games and other titles from popular developers.
X018: A global celebration of all things Xbox and the largest live #InsideXbox episode ever ???? pic.twitter.com/M1CmztUl8l
— Xbox (@Xbox) September 25, 2018
The other big news that the Xbox head announced today is that mouse and keyboard support will be coming to the Xbox One in preview in October. This has been a very popular request from Xbox gamers, and the Xbox One game Warframe will be the first to support it at launch.
Spencer made it clear today that Microsoft will be doing all the platform work, but it will be up to the developers to leverage it or not in their games. Experience may change based on games, and mouse and keyboard support won’t be coming to all existing Xbox One games unless developers enable it. “We put that control in the hands of developers,” Spencer emphasized, adding that it will also be up to them to decide if gamers using keyboard and mouse will be able to play against players using an Xbox controller.
Most USB keyboard and mouses should be supported at launch, but Spencer also revealed that Microsoft has teamed up with Razer to create new gaming hardware for the Xbox One. We’ll likely get more details at the XO18 event in November.
Bringing native support for keyboard and mouse on the Xbox One could be a great way to get more PC games get ported to the gaming console. When you think about it, the Xbox One is nothing more than a standardized PC with an x86 processor and running a customized version of Windows 10. We also have small selection of UWP apps available on the Xbox One, but there’s definitely some potential for more PC-like experiences on the gaming console.
