It’s really risky to say that Microsoft wasn’t serious about the gaming industry, especially after spending 69 billion dollars on the acquisition of Activision/Blizzard/King. But that’s what we gather from the words of the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella.
At an awards ceremony held in Berlin, the CEO of Microsoft spoke at length about the American company he has been leading for almost 10 years. He had to replace Steve Ballmer, which was no easy task.
Well, Satya Nadella had words for his company and for Xbox, the gaming division led by Phil Spencer. And from what he shared, it seems that Microsoft is going to double down on games.
What does Microsoft intend to do in the gaming sector?
“When I think about Microsoft, I perhaps think about developer tools, proprietary software, and gaming. These are three things we’ve been doing from the beginning,” explained Nadella.
“For us, games are the only area where we believe we can make a real contribution to consumer markets,” the CEO explained.
“If I look, the amount of time people spend gaming is increasing, and Generation Z is going to spend more time on it. The way games are made, the way they are delivered, is changing drastically. Be it on mobile, consoles, PC, or even in the cloud,” he continued.
“So, we are looking forward to doubling down our efforts as game producers and publishers. We will now be one of the biggest game publishers and also a company building platforms for it,” referring to the gaming platform Game Pass.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision was officially closed earlier this month, after the UK regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, approved a modified version of the deal.
The CMA had blocked the original deal out of concerns that it might harm competition in the cloud gaming sector in the UK, but Microsoft resolved it by stating they would sell Ubisoft the cloud streaming rights for both current and future Activision games.”
