14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's E3 2014 press conference event was a bit peculiar, in the sense that not a thing was said about gaming on the Windows PC platform, or on the company's mobile one, for that matter.
As such, Microsoft's presentation could be more accurately referred to as Xbox's press event, and the head of the division, Phil Spencer, provided the reasoning behind that.
"I'm head of gaming at Microsoft. When we're doing gaming strategy, gaming focus inside the company, that's my job. I think in a lot of ways, you could argue gaming on Windows has never been more healthy in that the biggest of the big franchises, League of Legends, World Of Tanks, those things dwarf a lot of what we're doing in this console space in terms of users and monetization. They're all on PC," Spencer said.
But that does not make the PC a viable platform to market at the E3 trade show in Spencer's eyes, as he believes that E3 is more about consoles than anything else.
"E3's a retail show. It's a retail show, it's a console show, so it didn't really feel like the right place for us to talk about Windows, but Windows and gaming on Windows is critical to Microsoft's success," he shared.
"For us, E3 is a console show and an Xbox show, and for us as Microsoft, Xbox is our gaming brand, and it's the thing we can fill an arena like this, we get millions of people to watch us on TV and we show our games and it's a brand that people care about," Spencer explained in an interview with Polygon.
He said that there were plenty of Windows games drawing large crowds and organizing huge championship events where they filled entire arenas, and that there might be a space to promote Windows titles there.
Those events, however, are usually very specific, organized by Valve, Riot Games, ESL, MLG and others, revolving around a single game.
There are bigger eSports events that feature multiple titles, but they still feel like the wrong place to prop up some Halo for PC advertisements, let alone to mount full-fledged Microsoft-hosted press conferences.
The Internet is torn, because in part the new Xbox head announced that the previously Xbox One exclusive Dead Rising 3 was coming to Steam, showing some amount of goodwill toward PC gamers. On the other hand, Microsoft has been going on and on about loving and supporting PC games since as far back as 2005, and gamers are accusing the company of never doing anything in that direction.
In all fairness, DirectX has always been improving, providing a more stable and powerful base for developers, and most Xbox games also have PC versions, except for some choice exclusives meant to push console sales.