Microsoft has a few reasons to celebrate as of late thanks to a few record-breaking buyouts to put a huge swathe of the game industry under its thumb. Microsoft’s big man in charge Satya Nadella shared a few of his big plans for the future, especially regarding the company’s plans now that its $US69 billion merger with Activision Blizzard is finally in the rearview mirror, ss recorded by Insider.
Nadella was set to receive an award from the Germany-based media company Axel Springer. In a ranging interview, he told hosts that gaming is one of the three tentpoles of the brand next to developer tools and proprietary software.
“If I look at it, the amount of time people allocate to gaming is going up and Gen Z is going to do more of that,” Nadella said. “The way games are made, the way the games are delivered, is changing radically. Whether it’s mobile, or consoles, or PCs, or even the cloud.”
Microsoft is now the second-largest publisher by revenue behind the China-based Tencent. With all these lucrative IPs under its belt from the Call of Duty franchise to Candy Crush, Nadella says the company was going to be “doubling down both as a game producer and a publisher.”
The Microsoft CEO is alluding to just how massive this merger truly is. It was so big it drew some massive red flags from regulatory bodies like the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The commission sued to block the merger, and though that initiative ultimately failed it still revealed Microsoft’s big plans to continue focusing on consoles through 2030. That includes a new Xbox Series S and Series X consoles with new controllers and overall better specs.
If Microsoft does plan to focus on software to complement its hardware initiatives that may take more time to ramp up. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently said that big franchises like Call of Duty won’t end up on Xbox Game Pass until next year. At the same time, Microsoft could be developing its own mobile app shop for some of its bigger phone-based games to compete with the likes of Google and Apple.
Nadella came on as CEO of Microsoft back in 2014, and he’s been at the head of some rather dramatic course changes over the past decade. Chief among them is AI, which he called the “biggest shift” for the company. Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI continues to be the company’s big focus going forward, and Nadella doesn’t seem very interested in sharing that boon with anybody else. He implied that more competition in the AI space would be bad for everybody involved, since with “few players, you can control them. But with many players, it’s harder to control.”
Nadella implied with fewer players, those creators who have complained about their work being trained for AI without permission might get a few more breadcrumbs thrown their way. He said he was in favor of regulation across the board, though of course, it can only be the type of restrictions that might give his company the necessary guidelines without impeding AI’s explosive growth. Not to mention that more regulation might also make it even harder for new entities to compete against Microsoft with AI.
But Nadella also had a few regrets. Chief among them seems to be his company’s exit from the mobile phones market. Microsoft obliterated its phone division back in 2017 and then kept jumping on the phone’s corpse over the following months. The Microsoft CEO said it was “one of the most difficult decisions I made.”
“I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones,” he said.