You may have noticed that Xbox boss Phil Spencer is throwing around Microsoft's hefty wallet. The company has made a number of acquisitions over the last year to shore up its first-party game development. And Spencer explained that he earned the right to do that because Microsoft's executive team is more interested in gaming than ever.
Spencer was on stage today for a discussion at the Barclays Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Conference in San Francisco. And he explained that Microsoft's gaming division generated more than $10 billion in revenue for the first time during its 2018 fiscal year. And surpassing that threshold turned some heads inside Microsoft.
Of course, Microsoft has had a gaming division since the Xbox debuted in 2001. But it has operated in something of its own silo until Spencer joined Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella's executive team in 2017. Quickly after getting that promotion, Spencer began flexing his muscles as the leader of a core pillar of Microsoft's business.
"We've acquired and started seven new first-party studios in the last year," said Spencer. "We obviously don't do that without tremendous support from Satya and Amy."
And the seven new and acquired studios are different from the big-time bets that Microsoft made before its current strategy. In 2014, ']the company bought Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5 billion. And Microsoft would only make deals on that scale because that's all the executive team cared about. But now that Spencer is free to spend some money on his own, he's making smaller, more strategic deals.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/05/xbox-boss-made-microsoft-love-games/
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