I think it’s fair to say that, no matter your opinion on Xbox, or PlayStation, or even Nintendo, we can all agree (for the most part, anyway) that Microsoft had the strongest E3 conference this year.
Maybe it’s the fact they’ve upped their gaming exclusives, or that they’ve partnered up with Oculus, but there’s something intrinsically strong coming from the Microsoft offence of software and gaming this year. The CEO for Microsoft has said that their focus on the video games and the new technology linked to them are going to play a huge part in the company’s future.
Windows 10 will, of course, be the main provider in the expansion for Microsoft; Oculus will use Windows 10 as an OS, Xbox One runs on Windows, and for the majority of people, your PC will be getting the latest Windows upgrade soon. According to a Microsoft employee mission statement, chief exec Satya Nadella has said that gaming will be key in realizing a ‘broader vision for Windows.’ It would appear that Microsoft is going to focus on bringing all of their gaming-orientated prospects together.
‘We will bring together Xbox Live and our first-party gaming efforts across PC, console, mobile and new categories like HoloLens into one integrated play,’ he said.
‘We will build the best instantiation of this vision through our Windows device platform and our devices, which will serve to delight our customers, increase distribution of our services, drive gross margin, enable fundamentally new product categories, and generate opportunity for the Windows ecosystem more broadly.’
Nadella is responsible for setting up the cloud infrastructure behind Xbox, alongside Bing and Office – so this guy taking the reigns on talking about what Microsoft has planned for the future is a pretty big deal.
We already know that thanks to Windows 10, Xbox One can stream games to your PC and tablet and that Phil Spencer (head of Xbox) wants to ‘put the gamer at the center of every experience’. Then Oculus dropped the bomb days before E3 that Xbox One owners can stream games to the Rift, too, which really underlines everything Microsoft are saying here:
If you want to be experiencing gaming on the forefront of current technology, get an Xbox One and run your PC on Windows.