Microsoft is positioning itself for a post-console war future, where software platforms are as big if not bigger than hardware platforms
There was some big news out of Microsoft and Xbox yesterday, even if it doesn't seem like it. The company announced that it would be bringing Xbox Live support to three mobile titles from Gameloft: This means these games will receive a bunch of Xbox Live's services wherever they're played, including things like leaderboards, achievements and friends lists. On its face, this is a fairly run-of-the-mill corporate announcement.
It's right in line with the enterprise work that has formed the backbone of Microsoft's business for years, just applied to a gaming context: it appears that Microsoft wants to be the backend that developers can use to manage their online services. Steam does something similar on PC and Epic Games is moving quickly to challenge that turf, but Microsoft is well-positioned to make a push on other platforms.
Microsoft is clearly still making hardware: we'll see the new consoles at E3 this year, and I don't think that we're going to see the end of hardware platforms or local computing in gaming anytime soon. The console war will be alive and well in 2020. But this has actually been a longstanding story in the gaming industry: consoles used to vary wildly, with strikingly different graphical capabilities and completely different libraries.
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