Microsoft joins the publishing top table | Opinion

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With the Activision Blizzard acquisition finally going through and the news that Starfield was the top-selling game of September, Microsoft's games ambitions are in a stronger place than they've been for years – arguably, since the first few years of the Xbox 360 era.

The Xbox division, whatever else it may be, is now a publishing juggernaut; it may have cost the GDP of a small country (and the largest acquisition in the history of both Microsoft itself and the games business as a whole) to do it, but Microsoft has gone from being an also-ran in game development and publishing, with a sorely neglected studio system, to being one of the world's biggest videogame publishers on any platform.

Consequently, there were plenty of allusions to this newfound position in the company's statements around its most recent financial results this week – and what was arguably most interesting wasn't the numbers themselves, but the way in which Microsoft's executives framed them.

More than anything else, Microsoft has really been at pains to point out the degree of commitment that they now have to game development and publishing. That might seem superfluous – given all of the above points, why wouldn't they be committed? Yet for all that the company has sunk enormous resources into gaming, questions do remain, because being a leading game publisher isn't Microsoft's end goal. That is just a means to an end; the end is being the dominant platform for game subscriptions, a business model which the company firmly believes is the future of this medium, and a major future source of revenue for cloud computing.

Nobody is entirely sure how things will play out,