Satya Nadella affirmed gaming’s position in Microsoft in a with their gaming division last month.
Nadella sat down with Asha Sharma for a Q&A with Microsoft Gaming. In this Q&A, he reaffirmed how important gaming is to the company as a whole:
There are core identities in this company. I don’t think Microsoft will exist without these identities continuing to thrive.
We’re a platform company, a developer company. Being a knowledge worker company, and gaming.
These are the main identities of what Microsoft has always meant, and will always mean.
Nadella also talked about video game’s impact in the tech industry as a whole. Of course, if gaming didn’t drive the growth of GPUs, GPUs would not have powered non-gaming industries such as GPU based servers or the cloud.
He also explained that Microsoft’s interest in expanding gaming doesn’t mean they’re moving away from Xbox consoles:
…This doesn’t mean we walk away from people are doing today — when we think about a AAA game on a console. The question is about where else can we go to extend that.
For me, we’re long on gaming. We’ll continue to invest, and we’ll always do so.