Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls Metaverse 'the next internet'

Talking about cloud gaming, Nadella said, "One of my coolest features is I can play the game instantly because I don’t even need to wait for it to download. I can just start playing on the cloud and then have it slowly stream down and use the local CPU."

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Metaverse and the future of the internet

Speaking about the Metaverse, Nadella felt that Microsoft's experience with designing games will be extremely beneficial when it tackles what he calls, "the next internet."

"Metaverse is essentially about creating games. It is about being able to put people, places, things [in] a physics engine and then having all the people, places, things in the physics engine relate to each other," said Nadella.

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On the Activision Blizzard deal

When quizzed about the Activision Blizzard deal, and whether the company will now find itself in the regulator's firing lines, Nadella said that even post the acquisition, "we will still be number three with sort of low teens share" and that even the number one company "is also teens share."

Nadella said that this showed how fragmented content creation platforms are, and said they, "will be a big player in what is a highly fragmented place."

He said that the biggest constraints content companies faced was distribution and said that the only open distribution platform was Windows.

"The biggest store on Windows is Steam [the digital distributor of PC games]. It’s not ours. People can do any payment instrument, whereas all the other gaming distribution platforms are closed," said Nadella.

"To some degree, that’s why we are very hopeful that, by becoming stronger, even with low share, we can create more distribution for many small players . . . using things like xCloud," Nadella added.