In an interview with Fortune, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella has discussed his favorite video games and changing his mind on the importance of gaming for the company, as he wasn’t very convinced about that when he was appointed.
When asked about why he changed his mind on gaming, since he now considers the business a relevant part of the DNA of Microsoft, Nadella said that it was the company itself to change its perspective, since it’s entirely focused on the cloud at this stage.
“I wanted to acknowledge that gaming is an important thing, and instead of trying to draw a direct line to what the rest of the company was doing at that time, we can still love gaming for gaming’s sake,” he commented about his past statement. “Since then, what has changed is the connected tissue of this company, which is the cloud.”
As for his involvement in gaming, Nadella said he hasn’t grown playing video games but has had quite intense experiences on Civilization and “a cricket game,” so he knows rather well what he is talking about when it comes to gaming.
“I’m not a big gamer; I will say that,” he admitted. “There’s an Xbox game, which is a cricket game that I love [Nadella is referring to the Don Bradman Cricket gaming franchise]. It’s a pretty decent game.” When he was young, instead, he played a lot of Civ “for a while,” and “then I somehow got all the cheat sheets, and then it became boring.”
This is a part of the same interview where Microsoft’s CEO pointed out that he doesn’t plan on stopping the company from producing more Xbox consoles, even though the focus of the platform owner is rapidly shifting to the cloud.
