You're going to see a lot more commonality in the gameplay and the experiences that people put together," he said of games that comes to Xbox One and Windows 10. "We did Shadowrun and enabled cross[-play] on PC and Xbox 360 and I think it was OK. I don't think it changed gaming when it came out but it was a good investigation of control input and fidelity, and I think you're going to see that same creative focus as this evolves to figure out which games are great for cross-platform play and which aren't. Resolutions between PC and console will be different in certain cases. Controllers versus keyboard and mouse is sometimes an issue that people sometimes get hung up on.
"My job on the platform side is to provide the tools and let developers figure it out."
Spencer said Microsoft isn't interested in demanding that developers support cross-platform play. Instead, it would rather enable "technology to make games great," and let developers make their own decisions. As for Microsoft Studios' games, he envisioned scenarios in which cross-platform play between Xbox and PC could work.
"You can imagine playlists that people are cool with just playing with their friends, like [Gears of War's] Horde mode," he said. "If you were on keyboard and mouse and I was on a controller playing PvE, you wouldn't care ... Or in PvP where there's a playlist that's controller-only, [keyboard and mouse]-only and cross-play — let people decide where they want to go play. In the end, some people are hardcore about the competition and some people just want to have fun playing together. And I want to enable both.
"The other thing I'm interested in that scenario is cross-platform chat. We have a lot of people that get into parties and just start chatting even though they're playing different games at the same time."
Microsoft said earlier today that Windows 10's new Xbox app will allow players to chat via voice and text across Windows and Xbox platforms. For more on today's Windows 10 event, check out Polygon's StoryStream.