Carlton is here to contest the FTC’s claims about competition and the Microsoft acquisition. An FTC attorney is questioning him, asking him to lay out the evidence that’s gone into his expert opinion.
Microsoft’s CEO is the most powerful figure testifying during this trial, and one of the few executives who’s not focused primarily on games. His name hasn’t appeared that much in the Xbox vs. PlayStation drama so far, but he’s in a position to get questioned about Microsoft’s role as a potential “Big Tech” monopolist, not just a gaming one.
Microsoft’s witnesses have been reiterating that cloud gaming is a feature for Xbox, not a full present-day service. The FTC is using Fisher’s recorded testimony to rebut that idea. Here’s Fisher discussing cloud gaming as a category:
“I believe it is not speculative and I believe it will ultimately be successful.”
This depends on accessibility of content, he says, but it’s not the non-starter Microsoft is painting it as:
“It’s my strong belief that cloud gaming has a profitable future.”
As we’ve seen in earlier days of testimony, Microsoft didn’t want its first-party content on GeForce now — “no effing way,” Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty said in 2021. (He says he feels differently now.)
That said, Fisher isn’t objecting to the proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition:
“I think it’s good for the industry.”
So says Nvidia’s Jeff Fisher, unsurprisingly! But enough of the PC vs. consoles wars. The FTC’s attorney is questioning Fisher about Nvidia’s previous discussions with the CMA, particularly the future of cloud gaming and its streaming service GeForce Now.
Fisher says GeForce Now doesn’t cannibalize the existing games market — users typically use “lower-end and incompatible systems,” says Fisher, to access games. “I do believe accessibility does bring in new gamers to high-end PC gaming,” and cloud gaming is part of that.
The FTC asks if Nvidia cloud gaming offers a “superior” experience to Xbox — Fisher says it’s “similar to or better than” the Xbox experience. “I believe that we have the capability of a tier of service that is better” than PlayStation’s service as well, he says.
The FTC’s attorney asks Kotick the difference between Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Call of Duty: Warzone — Warzone, of course, being the one with a mobile version. Regarding MWII, “it will get to the point where a lot of that content will be playable on the phone,” says Kotick, but not now — the FTC cites previous statements where Kotick says playing it on a phone would be “like using a refrigerator for a safe.”
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.
