Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has issued rare comment on the gaming side of the business, echoing recent language from high-level executives and saying people will be able to play Xbox games “everywhere, on every platform.”
This isn’t new. Xbox’s ‘Play Anywhere’ slogan has been center stage at Microsoft for months, and it’s existed in various forms for more than decade. What is relatively new is hearing Nadella himself – not Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer or Xbox president Sarah Bond – touch on the gaming side of Microsoft in this much detail.
Talking on the daily tech show TBPN (via Game File’s Stephen Totilo), Nadella explained his thinking behind Microsoft’s platform-fluid approach, re-confirmed the company’s intent to stay in the console and PC hardware market, and even gave a little tease as to the direction of the next Xbox console.
“Remember, the biggest gaming business is the Windows business,” Nadella said. “So to us, gaming on Windows… and of course Steam has built a massive marketplace on top of it and done a very successful job of it.
“So to us the way we are thinking about gaming is…. let’s, first of all we are now the largest publisher after the Activision [deal], so therefore we want to be a fantastic publisher, similar to the approach we did with Office.”
Nadella is of course referring to Microsoft’s Office suite of software, which is available on competing OS like Apple’s Mac. Meanwhile, Xbox has already released previously exclusive games like Sea of Thieves and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PlayStation.
“We’re going to be everywhere, on every platform,” added Nadella. “We want to make sure, whether it’s consoles, whether it’s the PC, whether it’s mobile, whether it’s cloud gaming, or the TV, we just want to make sure the games are being enjoyed by gamers everywhere.”
Bond recently teased that the next Xbox console “will be a very premium and high-end curated experience,” suggesting it’ll bridge the gap between PC and console. Meanwhile, Spencer recently said it’ll focus on “connecting all your devices in one place.”
Nadella added that Microsoft wants to innovate on the PC and console side of the hardware business, and again seemed to imply that the next Xbox will be something of a PC-console hybrid.
“It’s kind of funny that people think of the console-PC as two different things,” he said. “We built the console, because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming.
“And so I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom. But at the end of the day, console has an experience that is unparalleled. It delivers performance that’s unparalleled, that pushes, I think, the system forward.”
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