For a long time, there’s been a rumor that Microsoft would be getting out of the business of making and selling consoles to focus on apps and services. That was mainly due to new CEO Satya Nadella’s lack of interest in gaming, at least, in the days when he was appointed.
However, things have changed, since gaming has become a part of the overall strategy at the company. Mainly because it is a mean to drive the cloud business with Azure and all the partners using the platform — including Xbox.
In an interview with Fortune, Nadella reiterated that Microsoft doesn’t plan on leaving the gaming business and wants to keep producing consoles as long as the market requires them. So there is Xbox One, there will be Project Scarlett, and so on.
“The living room is not the only place where people play games—the living room is a super important place where they play games,” Nadella told the publication. “We still love our console; we’re going to have another console. We’re going to keep at it because we think that there are people who want to play games on the console.”
As for the game streaming platform on its way, Nadella added that “with Xcloud, we can reach anybody on a mobile phone to play AAA games. It’s more of an extension than to say what we were doing [in the living room] was wrong or not or didn’t make sense. It’s just that hey, it has become clearer and bigger, we have been able to really jump on that.”
And the same goes for PC gaming, where the company had had an approach of ‘we have Windows, and that’s it’ thus far. But the company is striving “to do even more on the PC” than what we’ve seen happen until now. The Xbox Game Pass for PC is just the beginning of a broader strategy.
