Microsoft has confirmed its plans to release Xbox first party games “across all platforms”, including PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.
Speaking during Microsoft’s annual shareholders meeting as well as a recent Bloomberg interview, CEO Satya Nadella confirmed the company’s plans to release Xbox first party games across all platforms, including PlayStation and Nintendo consoles. He stated this in response to a question regarding the health and future of Xbox.
In his response, Nadella said that Microsoft is “very, very” excited about everything that’s going on in gaming, especially with the closing of the Activision Blizzard King acquisition deal. According to him, the software giant now has the ability to do what it has always set out to do, which is to build great games and deliver them to players “across all platforms”, which includes “Xbox and consoles, the PCs, and now even including mobile gaming and cloud gaming”.
During the Bloomberg interview, Nadella specifically mentioned that he wants Microsoft to be a “good publisher” for both PlayStation and Nintendo. He stated that, prior to the Activision Blizzard King acquisition, Microsoft was “number three” or “number four”, and now post-acquisition, he believes that the company has a chance of being a good publisher on Sony, Nintendo, PCs and Xbox.
Additionally, he mentioned that the company wants to do its very best work in gaming. While he referred to it as a core business for Microsoft, he seemed more keen on discussing its connection to AI, stating how there is “tremendous synergy” between the gaming business and what the company is doing up and down the Al stack. He said that Microsoft is not a conglomerate, and the software giant has one platform that it expresses through multiple, different addressable markets, and gaming is one.
Nadella stated that, when he thinks about what Microsoft is doing at the infrastructure layer or what it will do at the edge, the same set of transistors that first were used for graphics are now being used for Al. He said that it should be possible to connect the dots and see why gaming is going to be more strategic to the company.
Earlier, multiple sources had indicated that Xbox is looking to foray into third party development, with ports of several first party titles rumored to arrive on PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2. Today, the Microsoft CEO appears to have hinted at these rumors being true.
