It's been exactly one year since the March 31, 2014, Microsoft announced the arrival of Phil Spencer, head of Xbox Division. Spencer has always been man "from part of gaming" thanks to his previous role as Director of Microsoft Studios, seemed the perfect man to correct the course of a ship which fans feared the same dangerously moving away from the principles that had just made love during the Xbox 360.

How was this first year? In our opinion, the great: retracing the most important decisions taken by the manager to return the favor with the platform gamer.

First, since its first settlement Spencer has been very critical towards the front of the Xbox One so far, explaining that he had been the "poor decisions" (which is taken very elegantly part of sin) and who wanted to bring the focus on the gaming console's Center, while multimedia functions and entertainment, although important, should represent a mere outline. Not surprisingly, a few months after they were closed the Microsoft Entertainment Studios , previously created in Hollywood to produce original television content to publish on Xbox.

Spencer has, however, taken a few months to rethink the entire Xbox strategy, and the first great sign of change came in may, when it was announced a version of Xbox One without Kinect , hitherto compulsory accessory, causing a sharp decline in prices that has immediately led to a steep rise in Sales .

This gave the opportunity also to Microsoft to release an updated SDK that developers could decide whether to "turn off" certain features of the motion sensor that kept busy a 10% of the GPU in order to free up more resources for the graphics of the games. But the console does not support stops at this: the first update for the introduction of new functionalities were started already after the launch of the console, and Phil Spencer has further committed to advancing more and more platform, launching the Xbox Site Feedback through which users could propose and vote on the most desired features and launching the preview program for testing in advance of all the news. This led to a series of monthly updates that have added important and often requested features such as support for external hard drives , removing the requirement for Gold subscription to the multimedia app launcher, the introduction of the Center Snap to operate easily without Kinect, improvements in the management of party and chats, a multimedia player with support MKV and DLNA , the customizable backgrounds with transparency of the interface, the ability to take screenshots , the reintroduction of voice messages and much more.

And the new direction of the Xbox you see are in the commitment to improve the platform, but also in the renewed focus on the gaming: E3 and Gamescom conferences have been completely focused on showing the great line-up of games being released, the excellent exclusives (which made headlines the Rise of the Tomb Rider ) but also in reiterating the importance of the indie scenewith ID program @ Xbox has started to propose a gem after another, effectively removing the much-maligned parity clause according to which a game already released on platform competitor wouldn't have come on the Xbox, what happened instead multiple times in recent months. Indicative then the acquisition of Mojang , creators of Minecraft , and also various statements that make us think as well as studies to date do not fully exploited, as Rare, might in the future begin to propose interesting titles.

This commitment was certainly noticed by gamer who, thanks to a very aggressive trade policy, have rewarded the platform making them win in terms of sales (at least in the us) the crucial Christmas period. To all this we add important new features that await us in the future: Windows event January 10 Phil Spencer has announced the arrival of Universal Apps that can be downloaded both Windows and Xbox One with cross-media buy, updating the kernel app "Windows console 10 (currently exploits to Win8), confirming that soon all our consoles can be transformed into dev kit, giving anyone the ability to create applications and games, although not evolved as those that exploit the native graphics APIs. And integration with the PC will always be closer thanks to the possibility to transform a PC with Win10 in a sort of additional monitors our Xbox One so as to be able to play when the TV is engaged. Also supports cross-play between Xbox and PC finally seems to become reality with different games that offer, first among all Fable Legends; Finally, let us not forget the arrival, scheduled for the end of the year of the first titles based on DirectX 12 libraries that should give developers more opportunities for optimization.

In short, the budget of this first year that saw the helm Commander Phil Spencer seems to us to be extremely positive and the Xbox appears to have finally taken the right route, one that puts the interests of the first gamer: and what do you think?