[Microsoft's Xbox Series X will go head-to-head with Sony's PlayStation 5. But in a recent interview with Protocol (via The Verge), Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that Microsoft is taking a long-term view on the future of the industry as a whole.

"When we talk about Nintendo and Sony, we have tremendous respect for them, but we see Amazon and Google as our main competitors going forward," Spencer said.

"We don't mean to belittle Nintendo and Sony, but the traditional gaming companies are somewhat out of position. They could try to re-create Azure, but we have invested tens of billions of dollars in the cloud over the years."

Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing service, which has actually been around for about a decade, but only recently has it taken an active role in the game. Although complicated (at least to me), Azure supports services like Microsoft's Game Stack and the upcoming game streaming service Project xCloud, which can also be leveraged for individual games: for example, the new Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example, uses Azure to recreate an entire planet in the game. (Another sign that Microsoft sees itself in a different space than Sony and Nintendo is its willingness to collaborate on gaming initiatives. Microsoft and Sony announced a "strategic partnership" last year to work together on developing cloud-based technology to support both companies' games and streaming services, but Spencer said Microsoft is willing to work with both companies on features that can be tackled more head-on, such as cross-play He stated. [But more importantly, the proliferation of reliable broadband Internet access has led to the emergence of streaming game services; Nvidia's GeForce Now service has officially launched and has shown early promise, and Electronic Arts is working on its own initiative with Project Atlas. As cloud-based AI once said, "It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here."

"We don't want to be fighting a format war with those guys while Amazon and Google focus on how to bring their games to 7 billion people around the world," Spencer said. 'Ultimately, that's our goal.'

This reminds me a bit of the kickoff to the previous round of console wars. Sony used the Xbox One's positioning as an advanced multimedia device in an ad promoting the PS4 as a nonsense, old-fashioned gaming console. This was absolute murder, but the world has changed.