Microsoft: targeted acquisitions against Sony, to prevent it from entering the subscription market

in 2019 Microsoft He believes that acquisitions should not only enhance Xbox Game Pass by growing it, but also prevent it Sony to enter the market Subscription services.

In an email dating back to that period, we can read that Booty diedXbox Game Studios president Tim Stuart encouraged Microsoft’s CFO to spend big on acquiring content in order to beat Sony in subscription services. The email appeared among documents presented during the trial between Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission, the US antitrust watchdog, over the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

“We at Microsoft are in a unique position to spend money to put Sony out of business,” Booty wrote, referring to spending $2 billion or $3 billion in 2020 to prevent competitors from catching up to content amounts at a later date. Impossible for anyone to start a new competitive video streaming service.” In the second sentence, Booty refers to competitors like Sony, Amazon, and Google. According to the Xbox executive, however, only Sony could have created a service that could compete game arcade:

“In video games, Google is three or four years away from having a working studio. Amazon has proven that they can’t handle fun content. Content is the only protection we have, in the sense of a catalog that runs on current-gen hardware and with the ability to create new games.” Sony It’s the only other competitor that can compete with Game Pass and we’ve got two years off to a great start and 10 million subscribers.

The email is particularly interesting to write ahead of major acquisitions by Microsoft, such as those of Zenimax and Activision Blizzard. It also has a potentially dangerous side to the process, albeit a very old one, because it shows Microsoft’s desire to attack the market for video game-related subscription services to create a kind of monopoly, growing to a size where that would be impossible. For any other company to compete in the same field.

In light of this email, Microsoft’s attempts to acquire SEGA and Bungie also make sense.