Microsoft has been spending a significant amount of time this year speaking about their plans for the future, specifically their plans in regards to gaming and Xbox. Amy Hood, chief financial officer and executive vice president spoke about this and more at the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference on the 12th of September. She touched on many points for Microsoft’s plans and what they have done recently, going on to elaborate on how the company will build “the best gaming cloud”.
Within that, the way I think about gaming and the way I think of increasingly thought about gaming is that it’s another first-party workload, no different from Dynamics or Office, then that’s made it different and more viable and more expressive by being built on the cloud that is intelligent. It’s a workload that allows us to build a cloud that’s built for different latency expectations, different usage patterns, different levels of 3D, but different levels of interactivity. It’s one of the best expressions of digital transformation of a business, the way transactions occur, in-product, user-led, user-loved.
If I said, “Well what do we want from every product that we ship at Microsoft,” it looks exactly the way gaming is. You’d want it to have the same passion and the same emotional reaction that I get from Excel, I want everybody to get from all workloads that we build, gaming fans love doing it. And there’s absolutely no reason people can’t feel that expressiveness.
Gaming is a great personification of what we’re trying to accomplish. We will have endpoints. They will be made better by the enablement of the cloud. We will have developers, which is what you call the gaming cloud, be able to utilize Azure, because we will build the best gaming cloud, because we run a first-party server.
Microsoft has been working on gaming with the same fervor as their other products according to many of the comments made throughout the presentation. It seems to be that Microsoft’s long running plan of cloud gaming intertwined with their consoles is coming closer and closer to fruition, with newly acquired companies such as Playfab helping move this vision forward. Amy Lee took the time to explain the importance of the Xbox team to the company as a whole, continuing to delve into the high esteem Microsoft has for the team throughout the presentation.
The retrospective for what Microsoft and Xbox have done recently, accompanied by a look into the near future makes for the presentation to be a great tease for what is to come. You can read the entire transcript of Amy Hood’s presentation here.