Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has come out swinging today as he was asked a range of gaming-related questions by CNBC‘s Tanvir Gill in an interview this Thursday. On the agenda was of course the transaction involving Microsoft and Activision Blizzard King, the interactions with the regulators involved in rendering a judgment on the deal, and the desire “for publishers to have more competition” in the marketplace.
Currently, the European Union probe is looking at the implications of Microsoft’s proposed buyout of Activision Blizzard King, halting the progression of the deal for now, a deal that would add franchises like Call Of Duty, Overwatch, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro The Dragon, Candy Crush, Guitar Hero, and many more to the Microsoft Xbox portfolio of IP, and quite reasonably the European Union wants to ensure a fair marketplace. Nadella pushes back on any assertion that the deal is untoward, saying, “Our entire goal is to bring more options for gamers to be able to play [on every platform] and for publishers to have more competition,” though he did add “Like all large deals, I think regulators should scrutinize them”
Of course Microsoft not only has its tendrils in the gaming space, but it has Windows, and its cloud architecture is widely used, and as such, CNBC asked Nadella what Microsoft’s ultimate goal was in the video game landscape, to which Nadella replied with, “Microsoft isn’t a conglomerate, I want to be very clear. It’s not about sort of gaming here and productivity here. The fundamental thesis for us is: what is the core technology that we build, that allows us to be in these different businesses while doing things that are valuable for customers? What can Microsoft uniquely do for gamers and game publishers? I believe there is plenty we can do. With gaming, for example, for us, it’s a streaming workload. It helps us build the right cloud infrastructure. Think about artificial intelligence, these AI-generated models, differently and how they can be used in both creation and testing of games.”
Nadella was also quick to highlight that in the event of the Activision Blizzard King deal not going through that Microsoft will continue its work in games well into the future, saying “We have been in gaming for decades. We will be in gaming going forward.”
Analysts expect a result of the proposed Activison Blizzard King acquisiton in the coming months.