Microsoft didn’t want to make a gold toilet but it kind of admit that it did.
The other part of Xbox’s narrative that has changed depending on whether it’s talking to regulators in court or to journalists is how it’s doing in the so-called console wars, whose importance to Xbox clearly differs depending on the audience. In 2020, Xbox told me that
the strategy was to reach gamers where they are, whether that’s on the subscription service Game Pass or on Windows PCs. But in internal documents and testimony, Xbox admitted that it would have liked to sell games exclusively on Xbox consoles… it started to bundle these titles on Windows to grow revenue, according to Spencer. “That’s not something Sony does,” he said in court.
In a panel with reporters earlier this month, Spencer echoed this, saying of Xbox’s strategy, “We’re going to focus on allowing player choice, but we know that console is kind of the core to how people think.”
Xbox is trying to play all sides here and is changing up its tune depending on who’s asking. The FTC trial has given us a unique look at what’s truly going on though: according to the internal documents, Microsoft executives saw their growth was slowing down and sought to build out a compelling way to reach mobile gamers using cloud gaming. When the U.K. antitrust regulator cited cloud gaming as a reason to block the deal, Microsoft revealed major shortcomings to the technology — issues that Spencer and Gluckstein had discussed in internal emails in 2019. The company hoped outwardly that casual mobile gamers would pick up Project xCloud, but internally, it feared that only hardcore gamers would give the cloud a try, and even they might not care. And even though Microsoft lags behind its console competitors, it’s fully intent on spending its way to the top, similar to what it
tried with Mixer and its $10 million contracts to lure Twitch streamers.
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