"We're investing to empower the world's two billion gamers to play the games they want with anyone, anywhere, on any device with our new game streaming service, Project xCloud which will enter public trials this fall," said Nadella. "Xbox Live monthly active users increased to a record 65 million with the highest number of mobile and PC users to date.
"We're bringing one of the the world's most popular video games to a new generation of mobile gamers with Minecraft Earth and mixed reality, and we nearly doubled our first-party studios this year to deliver differentiate content for our fast-growing subscription services like Xbox Game Pass, now available both on consoles and PC."
"I'll say we are in gaming because of what we believe are going to be the secular changes in the gaming addressable market for us," Nadella said later on. "We've always had a gaming position with console as well as the PC, but going forward we think that any end point can in fact be a great end point for high-end games, which is where our structural position is, and we now have a business model with Game Pass as well as all the supporting mechanisms for game pass like game streaming, we have a social network in Xbox Live that is the best in the business. So I feel we're well-positioned to what is going to be a much larger market than what was traditionally gaming in spite of all the success we've had over the years in gaming."
"The second point is that it builds on the rest of the cloud investment, so if you think about what we're doing with xCloud it's a workload on top of Azure," he continued. "If you think about capital allocation, what's happening in the cloud, what's happening in the edge, how we build the network, how we optimize with streaming… The same infrastructure for example is what Sony has decided to use as well and be on Azure as well as user AI capabilities."
"We're bringing one of the the world's most popular video games to a new generation of mobile gamers with Minecraft Earth and mixed reality, and we nearly doubled our first-party studios this year to deliver differentiate content for our fast-growing subscription services like Xbox Game Pass, now available both on consoles and PC."
"I'll say we are in gaming because of what we believe are going to be the secular changes in the gaming addressable market for us," Nadella said later on. "We've always had a gaming position with console as well as the PC, but going forward we think that any end point can in fact be a great end point for high-end games, which is where our structural position is, and we now have a business model with Game Pass as well as all the supporting mechanisms for game pass like game streaming, we have a social network in Xbox Live that is the best in the business. So I feel we're well-positioned to what is going to be a much larger market than what was traditionally gaming in spite of all the success we've had over the years in gaming."
"The second point is that it builds on the rest of the cloud investment, so if you think about what we're doing with xCloud it's a workload on top of Azure," he continued. "If you think about capital allocation, what's happening in the cloud, what's happening in the edge, how we build the network, how we optimize with streaming… The same infrastructure for example is what Sony has decided to use as well and be on Azure as well as user AI capabilities."
