Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios chief, Matt Booty, was encouraging Xbox CFO Tim Stuart to spend big money on acquiring game content in 2019 to set the company up to battle Sony in subscriptions. From a report: The revelation comes in an email thread that’s part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. “We (Microsoft) are in a very unique position to be able to go spend Sony out of business,” said Booty in a December 2019 email, referencing spending $2 billion or $3 billion in 2020 to avoid competitors getting ahead in content at a later date.
“It is practically impossible for anyone to start a new video streaming service at scale at this point,” said Booty, referencing competitors like Google, Amazon, and Sony. Booty described content as a moat and that only Sony could really compete with Xbox Game Pass: “In games, Google is 3 to 4 years away from being able to have a studio up and running. Amazon has shown no ability to execute on game content. Content is the one moat that we have, in terms of a catalog that runs on current devices and capability to create new. Sony is really the only other player who could compete with Game Pass and we have a 2 year and 10 million subs lead.”
Microsoft argues the email is old and that it never pursued such a strategy anyway.
