Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was featured in a live interview on TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network) discussing various topics, including the company's updated multiplatform strategy on the gaming front.
Nadella pointed out that following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is now the largest gaming publisher in terms of revenue. The goal, then, is to be everywhere the consumer is, just like with Office. The Microsoft CEO then interestingly referred to TikTok, or, to be more accurate, short-form video as a whole, as the true competitor of gaming.
Remember, the biggest gaming business is the Windows business. And of course, Steam has built a massive marketplace on top of it and done a very successful job of it. So to us, the way we're thinking about gaming is - first of all, now we're the largest publisher after the Activision [acquisition], so therefore, we want to be a fantastic publisher, similar approach to what we did with Office. We're going to be everywhere, on every platform. We want to make sure whether it's consoles, whether it's the PC, whether it's mobile, whether it's cloud gaming or the TV, we just want to make sure the games are being enjoyed by gamers everywhere.
Second, we also want to do innovative work in the system side on the console and on the PC. It's kind of funny that people think about the console and PC as two different things. At Microsoft, we built the console because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for games. I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom. But at the end of the day, console has an experience that is unparalleled. It delivers performance that's unparalleled that pushes I think the system forward. So, I'm very looking forward to the next console, the next PC gaming, but most importantly, the game business model has to be where we have to invent maybe some new interactive media as well, because after all, the gaming's competition is not other gaming. Gaming's competition is short form video.
The Microsoft CEO clearly refers to the fact that every entertainment bit competes for the user's attention on any given day. In a recent interview with the New York Times, following the announcement that Halo: Campaign Evolved and all future Halo titles would also launch on PlayStation consoles, Xbox Game Studios president Matt Booty shared a similar comment, mentioning that everything from movies to TikTok constitutes competition nowadays.
During the TBPN interview, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella made another statement that might irk some people in the industry. On one hand, he stressed the need to continuously innovate to keep consumers' attention; on the other, he said that to do that, it is necessary to have 'good margins'.
If we as an industry don't continue to innovate, both how we produce, what we produce, how we think about distribution, the economic model, right? Best way to innovate is to have good margins, because that's the way you can fund.
However, it is a tone-deaf statement following the many layoffs that have hit Microsoft as a whole and the gaming divisions specifically in the past couple of years. Meanwhile, Nadella's own pay grew 22% year-over-year and reached the astounding sum of $96.5 million.
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