Xbox Boss Comments on Partnership With Sony

It was announced last month that Sony and Microsoft were teaming up for a partnership of sorts. Unfortunately, no concrete details were disclosed regarding said partnership, so fans have been kept out of the loop as to what the two gaming giants are up to. Of course, we have seen gaps being bridged in the gaming industry over the past year, with much more progress to be made. Nintendo appears to be playing ball with Microsoft, but Sony has seemingly been the reluctant party. That said, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has now discussed the partnership with Sony a bit more during a recent interview with Kotaku, clarifying what it means at this point in time.

“We should start, just so we’re clear, that it’s a memorandum of understanding,” Spencer said. “It’s the beginning of the kind of conversation. Sony and Azure looking at the future of cloud gaming. We look at what you’re going to need in order to be a future gaming platform—content, community, and cloud are things that we focus on—and there are only a couple of companies on the planet that really have a global cloud that can reach gamers everywhere. Today, it would be us and Amazon in terms of the scale. Google’s building their cloud.”

He then went on to say how companies can either invest a ton of money to catch up to others, or they can take a deep dive into who their partners are and figure out who exactly they are. “And the nice thing for us is—you can focus on Sony, you can focus on a lot of companies—we have this thing called Microsoft Game Stack,” he said.

“We announced it at GDC: it’s DirectX, it’s Windows Studio, it’s Azure. Even [Google’s Phil] Harrison when he was on stage announcing Stadia was showing Havok, was showing Digital Studio, was showing things that we build—we’re going to have platform components, as Microsoft and as our gaming org that competitors use. We do think about the strength that we get as our platform grows and having great partnerships with gaming companies helping us grow that platform strength is important to us.”

Needless to say, it’s going to be interesting to see where gaming is at in five or 10 years from now. We just might achieve true cross-play across all games and all platforms. Perhaps the cloud will enable all of this. It’s anyone’s guess at this point.

What do you think about all of this? Let us know in the comment section below, or feel free to hit me up over on Twitter @anarkE7!