Microsoft CEO Would “Love” to See Console Exclusive Games Go Away

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went to testify in a San Francisco federal court yesterday to defend the company’s $68 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. And as other Microsoft gaming execs previously said, Nadella reiterated that the company’s intention to make Activision Blizzard games available on more platforms.

Nadella actually went a bit further than that yesterday and shared his dislike for the concept of console-exclusive games. “I grew up in a company that always believed that software should run in as many platforms as possible, and that’s just the Microsoft I grew up in, I believe in that,” the Microsoft CEO said yesterday (via VGC).

Of course, Nadella knows that exclusive games are part of the competition in the console market. In recent years, Microsoft spend billions of dollars to acquire studios to create more exclusive games for the Xbox and PC ecosystem. But according to Nadella, this is just the result of Microsoft having to follow the rules of the game created by its competitors.

“If it was up to me, I would love to get rid of the entire exclusives on consoles, but that’s not for me to define, especially as a low-share player in the console market,” Nadella said. “The dominant player there has defined market competition using exclusives, so that’s the world we live in. I have no love for that world,” the exec added.

These are pretty strong words from Nadella, though this idealistic view of the gaming industry needs to be balanced with what the competition is doing. Last week, Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming explained to the court that Microsoft selling its games on PlayStation consoles may actually help Sony to finance its console exclusivity deals.

“Every time we ship a game on PlayStation… Sony captures 30 percent of the revenue that we do on their platform and then they use that money among other revenue that they have to do things to try to reduce Xbox’s survival on the market. We try to compete, but as I said, over the last 20 years we’ve failed to do that effectively,” Spencer said.