Xbox Studios president Matt Botti said Microsoft may “spin Sony out of business” in the past 2019 email It was uploaded as evidence in an ongoing antitrust trial in San Francisco.
In an email to Xbox CFO Tim Stewart, Booty said, “We (Microsoft) are in a very unique position to spend Sony out of business.”
Booty said that in ten years, the company will look back and say, it was worth spending $2 or $3 billion in 2020 to stay ahead of the competition.
“Content is the only moat we have,” Booty wrote in response to redacted emails from the public offer on ARPU’s GP-themed thread, presumably representing Game Pass average revenue per unit.
The email is a candid discussion of Xbox’s competition and business challenges. Booty took shots at Google and Amazon, saying that Google has been 3 to 4 years off getting a game studio up and running, and that “Amazon hasn’t shown any ability to execute on game content.” Even streaming services weren’t left unscathed from Booty’s comment, as he noted that Hulu and CBS All Access “will be frivolous players in the space” due to their content falling behind Disney’s offerings.
David Cuddy, a Microsoft spokesperson, responded to the comment, “This email is three and a half years old and predates the acquisition announcement by 25 months. It indicates industry trends we never followed and has nothing to do with the acquisition.”
The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The email was dated December 2019, just a year before Xbox launched its next-gen Xbox Series X and S, and Sony would launch the PlayStation 5. Browse Xbox Series X. For CNN in 2020, I pointed out that Xbox lacks a blockbuster game to show off its next-gen capabilities, as Halo Infinite has been delayed until 2021.
Booty’s email came in sharp contrast to Microsoft’s repeated withholding of the Xbox Game Pass deal for gamers and the flexibility of gamers to experience games on Windows, which has made the Xbox ecosystem a tempter in the console wars. As Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer put it in court last week, the gaming hardware wars are a “social construct” that Sony has already won.
Lee Hebner, legal advisor with the antitrust advocacy group American Economic Freedoms Project, He previously said in an interview Booty terms were monopolistic. “They want to build a ‘moat’ around their console, which is antitrust slang for boxing in competitors. That’s the bulk of the FTC case in one email.”
This week, the trial runs from Tuesday to Thursday, and the judge is scheduled to make a decision in the next two weeks. A deadline for the Microsoft Activision deal has been set for July 18th. If the deal fails, Microsoft may renegotiate with Activision. The deal is already blocked in the UK.
So far, analysts are divided on who looks set to win the trial. Many note that Microsoft executives seem to crush their certifications, but Hepner noted that Booty’s emails bolstered the FTC’s argument.
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