During the second day of Microsoft’s Build Developers Conference in San Francisco the company briefly talked about upcoming Windows 8 apps that could appear on the new Xbox One.
The majority of the conference has focused on Windows 8.1, which is Microsoft’s short-term goal leading up to the official launch of the OS’s first update. Earlier today Steve Guggenheimer, vice president of Microsoft’s Developer & Platform Evangelism group, did however talk about the upcoming role that Xbox One will have in the long-term focus from a developer’s standpoint. “Xbox one has two engines, it’s got a gaming engine and it essentially has a Windows 8 engine,” Guggenheimer stated, the new Xbox One architecture allows the system to run on a Windows 8 kernel, allowing the Xbox one to become easily connected to other Windows 8 devices like tablets and PCs.
Guggenheimer asked that the developers things about bringing their Windows 8 apps to the Xbox One, showing debugging interfaces and briefly teasing other tools and UIs that developers will use to do so. He then stated, “If you want to know about how to get a head start about thinking about developing for Xbox One, the logical thing to do is go build Windows 8 applications.” Microsoft will go into more specific details at a later date, but as of now the Xbox One will support native apps on Xbox One as well as web versions.
Ever since Microsoft announced that the Xbox One would be dropping its used-games restrictions and 24hr check-in policy, the Xbox One has seen a substantial increase in pre-orders when tracking the Xbox Pre-orders on Amazon
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