Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has provided some insight into the plans for gaming at the company. In an interview with TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network), Nadella spoke about his ambitions to bring games developed by the teams under the Xbox Game Studios banner to as many places as possible. He even brought up comparisons to Microsoft Office, which is available on a variety of operating systems, as well as through a web-based interface.
“We are now the largest publisher after the Activision [deal] so therefore we want to be a fantastic publisher, similar to the approach of what we did with Office,” said Nadella (as transcribed by Game File). “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, so we just want to make sure the games are being enjoyed by gamers everywhere.”
He also noted that the biggest gaming business for Microsoft “is the Windows business,” while also crediting Valve with having built up a massive marketplace for PC gaming through Steam. As for the hardware side of things, Nadella also spoke about wanting to “do innovative work” when it comes to the console and the PC.
“It’s kind of funny that people thing about the console-PC as two different things,” he said. “We built the console, because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming. And so 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.” This, Nadella noted, means that the gaming business might also need to innovate on “some new interactive media.”
The force behind this innovation comes from the competition that the gaming industry has to face when it comes to consumers’ time, which is often taken up by short-form video content provided by platforms like TikTok. Ultimately, he believes that the gaming industry can only really innovate when it has “good margins,” since that will then mean that these innovations can be funded.
“Because, after all, gaming’s competition is not other gaming,” Nadella said. “Gaming’s competition is short-form video. And so 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—best way to innovate is to have good margins. Because that’s the way you can fund.”
Interestingly, former Microsoft executive Mike Ybarra also recently took to social media to express his opinion that gaming doesn’t really compete against short-form video. Rather, he noted that gaming competes with the time of consumers, and referred to it as an entirely separate concept.
Nadella’s words, on the other hand, echo what Matt Booty had said earlier this week about gaming facing competition from things like TikTok in light of Halo: Campaign Evolved being announced for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was just on the online tech show TBPN and provided one of the longer answers about his views of the game business that I’ve seen- Wants to put their games on everything, a la Office- Wants to revisit console/PC paradigm- “best way to innovate is to have good margins”
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo.bsky.social) 2025-10-28T19:25:35.368Z
