More so than the other two platform holders, Microsoft has opened up their ecosystem in a significant way. Not only with the upcoming xCloud streaming service and Game Pass, but in how openly the company now embraces PC gaming again, even allowing their major first party titles to come to other storefronts beside their Windows Game Store. This has lead some to wonder if Microsoft isn’t slowly, but surely, carving a path out of the dedicated hardware business. Well, that may be the ultimate end game, but for now Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says they are staying in the console business.
In an interview with Fortune, Nadella emphasized that they still see the living room still as the primary gaming space. Meaning, that while things like PC support and their diversification into streaming and open subscription services are a big part of the future, for the forseeable future they still look at dedicated hardware focused on those ‘living room experiences’ for their gaming division. It’s a simple case of a lot of people still wanting to play games on consoles driving the market.
“The living room is not the only place where people play games—the living room is a super important place where they play games,” he said. “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.
“And it just so happens that people love to play games on PCs. We didn’t have much of a value proposition to them other than saying we have the Windows operating system, and we’ve done everything we’ve can to serve developers there. But we’re now going to do even more on the PC.
“With Project xCloud, we can reach anybody on a mobile phone to play AAA games [gaming’s equivalent to Hollywood blockbusters]. 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.”
The company will release a new console (perhaps even more than one?) next year, so at the very least for the next half decade or so of that console’s lifespan the company is going to stay in the dedicated hardware game. After that? Well, only time will tell.
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