Xbox has become the voice of consumers at Microsoft

Hi, I'm Phillip Spencer, head of gaming at Microsoft. [MUSIC] I've been incredibly impressed by both his enthusiasm for learning about this gaming space and what it means. And the freedom he's given us to chart a path. And there's not a lot of don't **** it up, there's more what can this company do to help us be a more meaningful player in the games industry? [MUSIC] The thing that has stuck with me the most Is the experience through the Minecraft acquisition. Where, he became CEO in, was it February? I think that's right, yeah. And I became head of Xbox in gaming like March, April [MUSIC] And Nodge calls June. Nodge being the creator of fine craft and he thinks he's done, they want to sell the business. We were the first people he called, which was great. And when you look at where Satia came from in this company, Cloud Enterprise being something he had done in the past And the first acquisition that was going to lose people are going to ask questions. People are going to take notice. It was it was a sizable acquisition and it was this Java based PC game and I just thought that was such a kind of awesome move. It wasn't about him. He just like shed all of that and it never had all came up. That hey the first things that you didn't buy Minecraft. Now in hindsight is interesting loves Minecraft acquisition, which is great and it's turned out incredibly well, but that wasn't like that whenever you do these acquisitions, you know, you don't know how it's gonna end up and he was right there whole skin in the game. [MUSIC] Yeah, the company in almost all the things that we do as an enterprise company, and we've had a couple consumer businesses, and even this one that Bill started is great. He and Steve originally greenlit Xbox project, and But yeah. I think we've. the analogy I use with the some people is we like the garage band for a long time. As long as didn't play our music too load we were allowed to keep practising. And now we've kinda move more into the mainstream. But for the time when we were the garage band. Bill and Steve. As long as we weren't messing things up we Continue to make progress, and things are good. Bill has been incredibly involved in what we are doing. I still see Steve every so often. He asks how we expect things to be going. But yeah, I think at the time the mind craft acquisition, there were other questions about the [UNKNOWN] space. But it's, it's been great. [MUSIC] The decision to put gaming at the senior leadership table was an affirmation from the company that all customers are important to us. And then I bring how I build products, just cuz of the world I live in And I wanna be present in the room in terms of the impact I can have on the other things that Microsoft is doing. The vote of confidence that gaming is gonna be one of the top orgs in the company. A pillar of what Microsoft stands for. The team really internalize them. Thought about, well, what are the resources that Microsoft has? What does it mean for Microsoft [UNKNOWN] to be a leader in the games industry, what role should we play in this industry? And it's just been awesome to see kind of the way the team's embraced that. [BLANK_AUDIO] So many of the services that we interact with, whether it's Enterprise Services like Office 365, Slack, or these other things, Or our kind of consumer game entertainment experiences move with us from the device to device. So the idea that you start with the device descriptor as a way of talking about the services that we interact with, it's just kind of gone away. Is Netflix Is it a PC-based thing, is it a TV-based thing, is it a phone-based thing? Yes. And more and more, gaming's turning into the same thing. Where do I interact with my community? I interact with my community wherever I am. Where do I play games? I play games wherever I am. [MUSIC] Well I've been explicit That we needed to up our investment in our first party studios. NAD3, we announced the addition of 5D studios. I don't think we're done there. I know people wanna play great games on our platform. The thing I look at now is really this opportunity between the 200, 250 million people who will buy a console, whether it's from us, or Sony, or Nintendo. Or even something else out there that could be coming to the two billion people who actually play video games. And I say, "How can we enable the great content and stories that I see happening on my television screen or my PC laptop to reach every screen in the world?" If you go back a few years, We made this decision that when you buy one of our console games, we give you the PC, but from our first party the PC the ability to play on PC at the same time because it was hey if you if you buy Gears of War from us and you want to play on your PC great go play you should you should experience the world if they've on any device that you want to play and then you say, [MUSIC] There are all these phones out there, well, how do I make those phone accessible? Streaming is a way of doing that and that is something that we're investing in and there is even I think we're going and sometimes the complexity of the content, one of the things I've loved the games industry has really embraced, is how do we build games for all kinds Players, you can look at something like what Telltale Games does and build really narrative driven story games. I think that's incredibly look at what Nintendo does and bringing very family friendly, great games. It's all creating new forms of entertainment that people new games, new experiences for people to play, there alone. Or together, and the more we think about just getting more people to play. Getting people to play wherever they want to play with the people they want to play with. I think we're a growing industry and the opportunity for all of us.