Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has no love for exclusive games and would love to see them become a thing of the past.
That’s what Nadella said during his testimony yesterday as part of the ongoing hearings in the FTC vs Microsoft trial. During his testimony, the Microsoft CEO was questioned by both Microsoft’s and FTC’s lawyers. When asked about his philosophy for making software for more platforms or less, Nadella said that he would like to ditch exclusive software entirely, but pointed the finger at Sony for having them.
“If it was up to me I would like to get rid of exclusivity on consoles”, he said as part of his testimony. “But that’s not for me to define especially as a low-share player in the console market. The dominant player there [Sony] has defined market competition using exclusives, so that’s the world we live in.” He added, “I have no love for that world.”
Earlier this week it was revealed that Microsoft bought Zenimax/Bethesda as it was afraid that Bethesda’s upcoming Starfield would be skipping Xbox in favor of PlayStation. Apparently, locking down Betheda’s highly-anticipated sci-fi action RPG was a rather big concern for Xbox boss Phil Spencer.
“When we acquired ZeniMax one of the impetus for that is that Sony had done a deal for Deathloop and Ghostwire… to pay Bethesda to not ship those games on Xbox”, Spencer testified last week. “So, the discussion about Starfield when we heard that Starfield was potentially also going to end up skipping Xbox, we can’t be in a position as a third-place console where we fall further behind on our content ownership so we’ve had to secure content to remain viable in the business.”
As covered yesterday, PlayStation Boss Jim Ryan doesn’t appear to see Starfield’s Xbox console exclusivity as anti-competitive. “I don’t like it, but I don’t view it as anti-competitive”, the PlayStation boss said about Starfield being an Xbox console exclusive. The PlayStation head said the same about Redfall being an Xbox console exclusive. “I don’t like it, but I fundamentally have no quarrel with it”.
As always, we’ll update you as soon as more information comes in on this matter. What are your thoughts about Nadella’s comments, especially since locking down exclusive games has been common practice since the ’80s.
