Microsoft’s Videogame Boss and the Long Battle to Reinvent the Company

A Microsoft Corp. lifer and a lifelong gamer, Mr. Spencer has been the chief architect and evangelist for a bigger videogame strategy inside a company that revived its fortunes in recent years largely by focusing on business customers. His plan has shifted videogames at Microsoft from its two-decade emphasis on its Xbox videogame hardware to a vision of assembling a roster of studios whose games can be played across a range of devices. And Mr. Spencer has tied his game ambitions directly into cloud computing, which Microsoft Chief Executive

Satya Nadella

has…