Quote (Dan Corrin): You know, the desktop gamer, the one who makes up most of your profits from operating system sales...
Response: Actually, the vast majority of PC sales go to casual gamers, people not buying PC's to play games but to use them for pretty much anything else. Windows PC's make up about 90+% of the market, the lion share of that is business purchasing desktops, then its home PC's for normal web + document + email + content (entertainment) use and then its PC gamers.
In general, Microsoft doesn't have to do anything special for gamers. The hardware industry and gaming industry is already PC centric, that is why there are 6x more games released for the PC platform than Mac OSX. With Mac OSX being the biggest competitor for Windows in the market, and only holding 8% of the market share, it is a given that PC game developers will be releasing their product for the PC platform to reach the largest audience ... so Microsoft doesn't really need to worry about that group, its a given. What they need to do is make sure the casual computer user doesn't switch to Mac OSX due to the popularity of Apple products like the iPhone/iPad. Apple has seen their market share double in the last 5 years (4% to 8%). They don't want that to get any more traction.