PlayStation, Nintendo no longer biggest rivals: Xbox

Microsoft no longer considers Sony and Nintendo as its biggest competitors in the gaming industry said Phil Spencer, Microsoft's head of gaming.

Spencer rates Amazon and Google as his top rivals in the near future, mostly due to their investment in cloud-computing he revealed in an interview with Protocol.

"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," Spencer said.



"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."

Spencer said Microsoft was willing to cooperate with Nintendo and Sony on initiatives like allowing gamers on the various companies' systems to play with and against one another. He added: "I don't want to be in a fight over format wars with those guys while Amazon and Google are focusing on how to get gaming to 7 billion people around the world. Ultimately, that's the goal."

Last year Microsoft Corp said it is combining elements of its video gaming and Azure cloud computing businesses to court game developers, an action designed to use the strength of its Xbox gaming franchise to gain ground on cloud services leader Amazon.com.

Microsoft said it will start rolling out “Microsoft Game Stack,” a group of services that lets game developers do things like host multiplayer games and match players of similar skill levels.

The services are designed to work for titles played on any device - including those with operating systems from Microsoft’s onetime rivals like Apple and Google.



Microsoft competes against Amazon Web Services division to sell those cloud services. But it has been in the console gaming business with its Xbox device since 2001 and had 64 million users for its XBox Live online gaming service.