"Windows Live ID was not compromised. The FIFA '12 and other similar incidents are cases of social engineering or phishing, which are industry wide problems. Microsoft constantly audits its systems and reviews its processes in an effort to help protect customers from such issues," a Microsoft spokesperson told us.

Some of Microsoft's other plans for cross-platform and cross-buy — meaning that owners of Xbox and Windows platforms can buy a game on one platform and access it on multiple platforms — sound like they're still in flux. And some of those decisions simply aren't up to Microsoft.

"We're the platform. We will enable what publishers want to do with their content," Xbox head Phil Spencer said in an interview today when asked about cross-buy support for games that span Xbox and PC. "I'm not giving anybody's content away to somebody else. That's not our role. But how you end up with the game on both platforms is going to be dependent on who's selling the game.

"We're going to let the publishers decide the business model that they have on their titles."

"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 is "really looking at" enabling streaming from a Windows 10 PC to an Xbox One, Xbox head Phil Spencer said following a Windows 10 event today.

Earlier today, Spencer took the stage at the event to reveal a Windows 10 feature that works in the opposite way, allowing streaming Xbox One games to any Windows 10 PC or tablet. Games must support the feature, which will be possible with Wi-Fi on a local network.

"People ask about the streaming in the opposite direction — can I stream from my PC to my Xbox? — and I'll just say it's something that we're really looking at," Spencer said. "This announcement is what we have, but if you think about that vision — my games are my games wherever I am, and I can play with whoever I want to play with — we want to be able to land solutions that are as native as the one we showed there. We just have to kind of work with the physics of time and try to work it development schedules."

The firmware update provides the following two improvements:

Quick Connect. You can now connect a controller to an Xbox One console in less than 2 seconds, compared to 4 to 5 seconds previously.

Stability improvements. Microsoft says the firmware also provides a number of fixes that address issues submitted by customers and preview participants.