With the launch of the Xbox One X, Phil Spencer has been in the spotlight continually. He has conducted tens of interviews and in many of those, has reaffirmed the commitment by Microsoft to the gaming industry as a whole.
With Spencer’s recent promotion to Executive VP at Microsoft, we speculated that this only further confirms Microsoft’s drive towards capturing more of the growing market. It seems this was accurate as Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, commented on just that during a shareholder meeting yesterday.
We’re mobilizing to pursue an expansive opportunity in the 100+ billion gaming market. This means broadening our approach to how we think about gaming end-to-end. About starting with games and how they’re created and distributed, and how they’re played and viewed.
He also made comments about growing the Xbox Live userbase and deepening players connection to it ; something that again Spencer has mentioned many times over the past 12-18 months as well.
Our Take
As we’ve discussed at length here, Microsoft is playing the long game. The re-branding of the Xbox One as a platform, the move to the Windows 10 backbone, and the launch of the Xbox One X are only the beginning. Given how much we’re enjoying our Xbox One Xs (you can find our discussion/review on it here) we’re excited for the future of the Xbox as a platform. And as we’ve seen, competition among Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo simply equates to better consoles and more games for all of us.
