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Microsoft Sony XBox (Games)

Microsoft Exec Was Ready To 'Go Spend Sony Out of Business' To Strengthen Xbox (theverge.com) 38

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios chief, Matt Booty, was encouraging Xbox CFO Tim Stuart to spend big money on acquiring game content in 2019 to set the company up to battle Sony in subscriptions. From a report: The revelation comes in an email thread that's part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. "We (Microsoft) are in a very unique position to be able to go spend Sony out of business," said Booty in a December 2019 email, referencing spending $2 billion or $3 billion in 2020 to avoid competitors getting ahead in content at a later date.

"It is practically impossible for anyone to start a new video streaming service at scale at this point," said Booty, referencing competitors like Google, Amazon, and Sony. Booty described content as a moat and that only Sony could really compete with Xbox Game Pass: "In games, Google is 3 to 4 years away from being able to have a studio up and running. Amazon has shown no ability to execute on game content. Content is the one moat that we have, in terms of a catalog that runs on current devices and capability to create new. Sony is really the only other player who could compete with Game Pass and we have a 2 year and 10 million subs lead."

Microsoft argues the email is old and that it never pursued such a strategy anyway.
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Microsoft Exec Was Ready To 'Go Spend Sony Out of Business' To Strengthen Xbox More

Microsoft Exec Was Ready To 'Go Spend Sony Out of Business' To Strengthen Xbox

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  • MSame as it ever was (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @11:11AM (#63636954) Journal

    That has always been MS's M.O. since they got big: subsidize the MS product until competition folds or delipidates due to lack of sales. They used it on Paradox, Delphi, Lotus 123, Quatro-Pro, OS/2, and countless others.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @11:17AM (#63636982)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        > Both were dirty tricks, and neither had anything to do with outspending.

        MS did subsides MS-Office for a while. I will agree that subsidizing isn't their only trick, though.

      • I remember "back in the day" I used DR-Dos with windows 3.1 But then when Windows 3.11 came along, DR-Dos didn't work because MS held the code or put something in 3.11 to not allow it to work with DR-Dos. The old newsgroups were upset with that too. It wasn't until after 3.11 was in the wild that Digital Research was able to patch DR-Dos to work with 3.11

        • Re:DR Dos (Score:4, Informative)

          by samdu ( 114873 ) <samdu@@@ronintech...com> on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @02:52PM (#63637652) Homepage

          I remember reading about an attorney that went to a computer store to get the latest version of DR-DOS for his business. The shop owner offered him MS-DOS. He didn't want MS-DOS. The store owner told him that they can't carry DR-DOS because Microsoft told them if the did, they couldn't carry any Microsoft products.

          This kind of stuff is the reason I don't want MS to ever get a stranglehold on any other market.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Too many people and companies love VSCode without thinking it through like you.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Moryath ( 553296 )

      It's also Sony's MO. They push for exclusives and try to recoup the money out of "standards" and submarine patents. And we can all see the number of games that are "Timed Exclusive" to Playstation, not because they need to be (the devs are LITERALLY designing on PC hardware and then porting to whichever console anyways), but because Sony dumped bags of money onto a developer.

      The original Playstation, Sony ran with after their Nintendo partnership fell through... but Sony also "just so happened" to have it

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by edwdig ( 47888 )

        PS2 had DVD, because Sony had a submarine patent.

        PS2 had DVD because it launched right as DVDs were about to take off, and Sony saw the potential in one device that could play movies and games. DVD players were expensive then, so it made the PS2 an easy sell. They did have to eat a big loss per unit on the hardware, but it all paid off. Patents had nothing to do with it.

        PS3 pushed Blu-Ray because Sony had a submarine patent.

        It wasn't a patent issue. Sony owned Blu-Ray factories and was one of the biggest players in Blu-Ray. The extra storage was very useful on the PS3, and PS2 as a DVD player made a lot of sense. There were pretty obvious reasons to go with it. It didn't work out great in the end though, as Blu-Ray was too early in its life cycle and made the PS3 too expensive. PS3 really didn't sell until prices came way down.

        PSP pushed those ludicrous, battery-power-devouring "UMD" cartridge-discs and ridiculously expensive Sony Memory Sticks instead of SD cards... because Sony wanted to push those formats in Japan.

        Mini-discs for a portable was the dream for a long time. The GameCube used mini-DVDs because Nintendo thought they'd be able to release a portable version a few years later, but eventually they realized it wouldn't work. Sony eventually tried mini-discs and got mixed results.

        I don't know much about the memory sticks on PSP. Could very well just be a "we want to push Sony products" thing. The custom memory on the Vita was because the business model was to sell the Vita at a loss and make it up with overpriced storage. That didn't work out well.

  • Well, Duh! (Score:3)

    by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @11:15AM (#63636968)

    It's Microsoft. What did anyone expect? Gates may have gone to pasture and decided to spend his filthy lucre to buy himself a better reputation. Ballmer may not be jumping around and throwing stuff like a rabid gorilla on PCP anymore. But it's still Microsoft. It's still the house that Gates and Ballmer built. The leopard doesn't change its spots. It just hires a PR staff and, unlike Musk's, listens to what they say.

  • Of Course (Score:4, Insightful)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @11:34AM (#63637032)
    They weren't going to win via innovation and competing on merit. That's not, and never has been, the Microsoft way.
    • Innovation is literally the term Microsoft coined for this.

      https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]

      But there is another issue here, one that is hardly ever mentioned and that's the coining of the term "innovation." This word, which was hardly used at all until two or three years ago, feels to me like a propaganda campaign and a successful one at that, dominating discussion in the computer industry. I think Microsoft did this intentionally, for they are the ones who seem to continually use the word. But what

  • They're pursuing it RIGHT NOW (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @11:37AM (#63637046)

    Microsoft argues the email is old and that it never pursued such a strategy anyway.

    That's a key part of what the Activision acquisition is about!

    This is why I think Sony and Nintendo should pursue a very nasty policy toward Microsoft before regulators:

    "You want to buy Activision? Fine, you're a software company. Then port Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty in perpetuity to Playstation and Switch."

    I mean what could Microsoft execs even say against that to their shareholders? No, we don't want to sell Halo, Gears of War, CoD, etc. to users of much bigger platforms and roll around in cash like filthy pigs?

    • Then port Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty in perpetuity to Playstation and Switch."

      Would mean a lot more if they were made to port Starfield [xbox.com] to other platforms... buying Bethesda was about stopping that game from reaching the PS5.

      • After Fallout 76 (and even Fallout 4 to a lesser extent) I'm considerably less excited about Starfield. But even if I do end up buying it, I'd do so on PC. Even the good Bethesda games are buggy messes or have enough other problems that installing a community balance pack that fixes the bugs and adjusts other settings so game's systems function better. You can't really do that with consoles.

        • After Fallout 76 (and even Fallout 4 to a lesser extent) I'm considerably less excited about Starfield.

          I felt the same way but after the long preview video they did showing all kinds of gameplay, I think they have a real winner. It has a ton of flexibility and story it seems like, and a giant range of worlds.

          Probably is best to buy it on a PC if you can though, and I'm sure you are right about it being buggy at launch.

    • Well if it is MS of old, they'll "port" games to PlayStation and Switch. These days ports are sometimes riddled with bugs as to be unplayable--that's the excuse they'll use when they justify not doing any more ports because they were not profitable. Never mind that people did not buy the game because reviewers warned them to stay away until the game was patched--which never happened. Shockingly.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      That's a key part of what the Activision acquisition is about!

      This is why I think Sony and Nintendo should pursue a very nasty policy toward Microsoft before regulators:

      Sorry but hell-the-fuck-no. Sony is the fucking worst in this case. You've fallen for the bait, you've gotten angry at one line in the the story. If anything has come out of the FTC hearing it is that Microsoft is an absolute underdog in this case, the company with lots of money who has *not* engaged in anticompetitive behaviour, even while their competitors (the ones you support) do precisely that.

      "You want to buy Activision? Fine, you're a software company. Then port Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty in perpetuity to Playstation and Switch."

      Are you asking for the court to legally get your tenant to support your rent seeking? Sony charge a ridiculous

  • Microsoft has a monopoly on desktop, but not gaming, clouds, and their other endeavors. And theyâ(TM)ve noticed a trend, without a monopoly they donâ(TM)t do very well. So go spend that Monopoly money and buy all gaming studios

  • Original Xbox guy here... Halo, MechAccault, KOTOR and Xbox Live was like an explosion on the scene. PS2 had horrid graphics by comparison. It was obvious Xbox was king of that generation. Xbox 360 kept it going with perfect - everything. Best exclusives, MassEffect, Gears of War, Kinect, and a better Xbox Live to boot.

    Enter the Xbox One - the disaster MS has never recovered from. Full of Ads, UI that changed every 20 minutes for no real reason, a stupid 'record that' that took 30 seconds to even open,

  • This just seems like common sense. If you can outspend your competition, and win, by all means, it's the correct course of action. Not doing so would make you a fool. This whole thing is stupid. MS is a third place competitor, looking to increase their position. Some serious pockets are being lined here to try and prevent this acquisition.

  • It should be no surprise that neither company actually likes each other.

    This is what Sony's message on Xbox was:

    We had this expression in our business meetings: 'Kill them right at the start and take no prisoners' when it came to Microsoft. It worked at least for PS2, and it continued to work on PS3 and PS4, and it'll probably continue to work on PS5 because we drove piles under the strength of the PlayStation equals games concept at that stage when we were getting ready to take Microsoft on."

    (source: https [pushsquare.com]

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