In a recent interview with
Protocol, Microsoft's head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, revealed that he doesn't really see Nintendo and Sony as competition this upcoming generation; explaining that Amazon and Google are more likely to become Xbox's competition moving forward.
According to Spencer, "
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. 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 does make a good point, especially since the president of Nintendo has already revealed that, at this point in time,
they are only focusing on dedicated hardware.
Super Mario Bros. series creator
Shigeru Miyamoto has also revealed that he thinks hardware is not going anywhere anytime soon — although he does believe that cloud gaming will become widespread in the future.
We still don't know how Sony will tackle cloud gaming, since we don't have any real information about their PlayStation 5 console, but the fact that they are developing a new console pretty much confirms that cloud gaming is not on their plans just yet. We'll just have to wait and see how everything unfolds in the future.