At PAX Australia Larry 'Major Nelson' Herb spoke about Xbox as a platform to GameSpot. With the recent Xbox Play Anywhere initiative the lines between Xbox as a console and Xbox as a service infrastructure have blurred, and Microsoft will only be pushing that further in the future.

Hyrb is the director of programming for Xbox Live and is therefore at the forefront of Microsoft's development of Xbox as a platform. Hyrb stated that with PC and the upcoming Project Scorpio joining the Xbox One under the umbrella of the Xbox Platform, there's going to be more choice for customers than ever as to how they can game.

Microsoft had tried to attract PC players before with its Games for Windows Live program, which was massively panned, but now it's looking to give PC gamers equal treatment to the Xbox console audience that has been their gaming bread and butter for over a decade. Project Scorpio isn't seen as a "new" platform, but a continuation of the Xbox family, offering increased capabilities over the standard Xbox One for those that wish to purchase it.

The big take on this mindset though is that players will be able to take their content with them. To do that, though, will require almost total reliance on a digital storefront. If you want to use Xbox Play Anywhere, you're going to have to use the Xbox Live service. Even if you buy a physical copy of an Xbox One game, that disc isn't going to work on your PC. You're going to have to download a copy of the game. Furthermore, the Xbox platform promise seems to be that if you upgrade to new hardware "all your content goes with you." This appears to indicate that Microsoft intends for customers to utilize their digital storefront in even higher numbers.

Customers are becoming more and more accepting of digital marketplaces, much more so than when they rebelled against the announcement that the Xbox One would need to be "always online." Microsoft changed that requirement in the face of public agitation, but it seems like they're slowly inching towards that same end goal. Regardless of the fact that most Xbox platform users wouldn't be affected by a digital-only media approach, there are still gamers all over the world that don't have access to reliable, unlimited high-speed internet.

In the United States, there are plenty of people living in rural areas who depend on physical media to be able to play the latest titles. Giant ISPs like Comcast and their attempts to add caps onto broadband connections for millions of Americans would also put quite a damper on a digital-only gaming world. Hopefully, Microsoft will keep all of its customers in mind when making decisions involving media availability instead of just the majority.