Wednesday’s hearings begin with yet another executive: Bobby Kotick, who’s so far appeared only in conversations and messages referenced by other witnesses. Kotick will presumably be asked about these conversations, like a meeting where PlayStation’s Jim Ryan reportedly told him “I just want to block your merger.”
This creepypasta-esque story by merritt k is fiction — think “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by way of NeoGAF. But it may strike a chord in anyone who’s fallen way too deep into a real internet in-joke.
[Other Strangeness]
And it requires not just a “reasonable person” viewing the words as objectively threatening, but some kind of subjective intent to threaten, or at least recklessly disregarding a risk of it. The ACLU is happy with the outcome, which follows arguments held in April. Ken White of Popehat has some more complicated thoughts well worth reading:
This century, the Supreme Court has protected the First Amendment right to free speech more vigorously and strictly than any other constitutional right. This decision is more of a middle-ground approach, neither as speech-protective nor as censorship-friendly as it could be.
[popehat.substack.com]
Microsoft’s mobile gaming travails are the big theme of this early testimony. Phil Spencer says Microsoft found “very limited success” making native mobile games outside the Minecraft series, and it turned to cloud gaming in hopes of winning players over that way:
“My real hope was the fact that we’d had at that point nearly 20 years of Xbox games built on our console platform that would give us a unique offer to players on phones.”
Turns out this didn’t work. Latency was an issue, things like game fonts weren’t designed for a tiny screen, and Microsoft never solved the controller problem. Remember, yesterday Microsoft contended that streaming is more of a feature than a separate product right now — so it says it’s not creating a monopoly risk by enhancing its own service.
We’ve started off with a conversation about the state of games industry revenue, focusing on the split between mobile and console revenue. “Mobile has grown to become the number one gaming platform on the planet,” Spencer acknowledges.
Spencer notes that Microsoft would suffer damage from going back on its word in any case — “I think as we’ve seen even in preparation for this that gamers are an active and vocal group. Us pulling Call of Duty from PlayStation in my view would create irreparable harm for the Xbox brand,” he said. But now he’s also solemnly sworn it under oath.
“I would raise my hand, I would do whatever it takes,” he told Judge Corley in court. “My commitment is, and my testimony is, that we will continue to ship future versions of Call of Duty on Sony’s PlayStation 5.”
It is, perhaps, worth specifically noting the “5” in that oath.
Phil Spencer is back under Microsoft’s questioning, and he’s trying to dispel allegations that Microsoft would degrade a game like Call of Duty on PlayStation — an argument Sony in particular has made.
Building a “high-quality game for Xbox and building somehow a lower-quality game” on PlayStation would be a huge financial and reputational loss for Microsoft, says Spencer, given how much more successful (in his estimation) PlayStation is. Microsoft’s lawyer brings up an analogy: it would be like filming a good version of a movie to open in Omaha, but a bad one to launch in New York.
It’s a different question than whether Microsoft might withhold games altogether — something that means it would lose sales from PlayStation, but also would streamline development.
A 2021 interview notwithstanding, Spencer tells an FTC attorney that it’s too early to know:
“I think we’ve been a little unclear on what platforms it’s launching on, given how far out the game is. It’s difficult for us right now to nail down. ... It’s so far out it’s hard to understand what the platforms will even be at this point.”
So what about that interview? “I don’t know that I’ve made a public statement saying that,” said Spencer in response to questioning. “When I said it I believed it was [true], but if you ask me today I can’t recall a public statement.”
It’s part of a long line of questioning where the FTC tries to establish that an Activision Blizzard acquisition would lead to more exclusive games.
The sanctions for both lawyers involved are in, and they’re pretty embarrassing: a $5,000 fine, plus they have to send a letter to every real judge named in the made-up cases. For what it’s worth, Steven Schwartz says he thought ChatGPT was just a “super search engine.”