Microsoft is spending a lot of time getting Pete Hines to explain why Activision’s Call of Duty isn’t a direct competitor for the Microsoft-owned games Starfield and Redfall. This includes a little more admission that Arkane’s Redfall wasn’t everything Microsoft hoped for — something Phil Spencer acknowledged after launch.
The FTC is arguing that game exclusivity is an anti-competitive move, but Pete Hines is under friendly questioning from Microsoft’s attorneys now, and he’s making the opposite case: that exclusivity lets you streamline a game. The anticipated Xbox exclusive Starfield, he says, wouldn’t be coming out on September 1st (it’s actually September 6th) if it were also coming out on PlayStation:
“We would not be putting this game out in nine weeks if we were supporting an entire additional platform, in my opinion.”
Poor Redfall — first it got panned on virtually every gaming channel on the internet, now it’s an exhibit in the FTC’s case against Microsoft. The FTC calls it a big-budget AAA game that got locked off PlayStation after Microsoft bought its developer Arkane. Pete Hines admits there “might be some differences of opinion” on whether it meets that standard.
In seriousness, this is just a granular distinction about games industry buzzwords. But I will take it as a diss on Redfall, because my god did that game disappoint me.
He and an FTC attorney are currently struggling to nail down whether he reports to Microsoft executive Phil Spencer and when “Bethesda” actually refers to its parent company ZeniMax. Less mind-numbingly, the FTC is pushing Hines on a core piece of its argument: that Microsoft buying ZeniMax/Bethesda led to games getting locked down to Xbox.
Matt Booty says his thinking about keeping Xbox content exclusive has changed since the days of “no effing way” in 2019. (I’m not sure if attorneys are bowdlerizing “fucking,” or if that’s literally what he wrote.) His explanation — in response to a question from Judge Corley — is a commentary on the streaming wars:
“I think we’ve seen that while content is absolutely important to a strategy, it really isn’t a durable advantage that others can enter a field and others can build a content library relatively quickly.”
His example is Disney Plus competing with Netflix — where he argues Disney has been able to ramp up its library quickly. And, obviously, it’s a way to downplay the idea that Microsoft will make Activision Blizzard games exclusive if the deal goes through.
Booty is the head of Xbox Game Studios and one of many Microsoft executives set to testify on both sides.
One of Section 230’s lesser-known elements is protection for users, not just providers, of online platforms. That element got an interesting test this month, when an appeals court ruled on whether a high-schooler who created an Instagram account was liable for letting friends bully teachers with it. Per the ruling, things did not go well for him:
When a student causes, contributes to, or affirmatively participates in harmful speech, the student bears responsibility for the harmful speech. And because H.K. contributed to the harmful speech by creating the Instagram account, granting K.L. and L.F. access to the account, joking with K.L. and L.F. about their posts, and accepting followers, he bears responsibility for the speech related to the Instagram account.
Legal blogger Eric Goldman thinks this was the wrong call — but either way, it’s a fascinating edge case for 230.
I’ve been playing the Junji Ito-influenced horror RPG periodically since the Early Access launch in 2020, and I’m incredibly excited to try the full game! It’ll be available on PC, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4 and 5.
