Phil Spencer: Amazon and Google Are the Competition, Not Sony or Nintendo
Phil Spencer doesn't consider Sony and Nintendo as Microsoft's main competitors in the coming years. According to the head of Xbox department, the company will rather compete with Google and Amazon, and not with hardware but with game streaming services.
Whether we want it or not, another console war is already in the air. PlayStation 5 and the new Xbox will make their debut this year, but there are already 'discussions' about the superiority of one over the other before the full launch of both platforms. But not everyone's interested in this kind of jostling, including... the head of Xbox. Phil Spencer said in an interview with Protocol that Microsoft's main competitors are not Nintendo and Sony, but Amazon and Google.
Of course, this isn't about stationary platform competition. The apple of the company'ss eye is video game streaming, and the key to it is Azure, a giant cloud platform developed by Microsoft. On the other hand, we know that Sony is unlikely to have a similar system and must benefit from a competitor's solution. Nintendo is not yet interested in streaming games. Even if both companies suddenly wanted to compete with Project xCloud, according to Spencer, this would have been at a huge cost:
"When you talk about Nintendo and Sony, we have a ton of respect for them, but we see Amazon and Google as the main competitors going forward. That's not to disrespect Nintendo and Sony, but the traditional gaming companies are somewhat out of position. I guess they could try to re-create Azure, but we've invested tens of billions of dollars in cloud over the years."
This could discourage these companies, but would not be an obstacle to Google and Amazon. The former already has its own game streaming platform (albeit not very successful so far), and for a long time there have been rumors in the industry about service developed by the latter company and its announcement this year. Both are certainly not short of resources and have long shown considerable interest in the video games market. That's why Spencer doesn't want to get involved in "platform wars" with Nintendo and Sony, while Google and Amazon will make progress in trying - as Xbox's head put it - to deliver games to seven billion people worldwide.
As you can see, Spencer is one of those who consider streaming the future of video games. And he's not the only one. Ken Moss from Electronic Arts, Atsushi Inaba from Platinum Games and Raul Rubio from Tequila Works talked about the likely impact of this technology on the industry. Apparently, not even the poor debut of Google Stadia was able to shake the faith of the industry giants in the future of streaming.
