FTC v. Microsoft: all the news from the big Xbox courtroom battle
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Judge Corley wants to know about consumer choice, because you can play a lot of Xbox Series X games on PC.
Judge Corley: What if they have a PC? Why isn’t everybody, particularly in 2023, likely to own a PC? So they don’t have to buy one.
FTC: The gaming PC is a special kind of PC, it’s not a run of the mill PC.
Judge Corley: Maybe I’m biased in the world I’m living in... during the pandemic. Nobody did it on a bargain basement PC. Everybody had a $1,000 or $1,500 PC.
Judge Corley: Why wouldn’t being able to play on PC have downward pressure on the Xbox? If you raise [a console] to $1,000?
FTC: For any given market where we assume the price increases fast then... almost anything becomes a substitute.
The FTC says it has seen no evidence that Microsoft is benchmarking the PC against an Xbox. The FTC could easily explain this to Judge Corley that a gaming PC requires a dedicated GPU to play Call of Duty, significantly increasing the price and complexity compared to the PCs people typically have at home or may have purchased during the pandemic.
The FTC could also argue and easily cite data that shows the vast majority of PC sales are laptops, which don’t have the ability to play games like Call of Duty. Instead, they’re going around in circles on basic questions where Judge Corley is trying to understand simple stuff.
It’s almost as if the FTC doesn’t understand the gaming market it’s trying to define.
