Microsoft is back to making itself look like the lowly underdog again, as it tries to pretend is only a minor player in the games industry.
Although the recent comments about Sony no longer wanting to work with Activision, , come from comments made back in April, today marks the start of with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the . So we’re afraid you’re going to be hearing a lot more about their attempts to buy Activision over the next few days.
Although the recent was the most positive press Microsoft has had in years, for the FTC they’re once again adopting the tone of a downtrodden, four times loser who has no power or influence in the games industry.
In fact, they’ve come out and said literally that, ‘Xbox has lost the console wars, and its rivals are positioned to continue to dominate.’
According to Microsoft, Xbox only had a 16% share of console sales in 2021 and overall has a 21% share of the current console install base.
Because Microsoft refuses to share its sales figures publicly there’s no way to know if they’re massaging those figures to appear more irrelevant than they are. It’s not even clear if that’s worldwide or just in the US, but it’s probably the former as that would make them look worse – which is what they want at the moment.
There are a lot of redacted comments, in the documents obtained by , that make it difficult to tell what else was said, but it seems as if Microsoft also went into detail about Sony and Nintendo’s market share.
Microsoft has largely ignored the Switch in most of their comments so far, as they prefer to paint Sony as dominating the industry – despite the fact that Nintendo has been outselling both for years.
Although the comments are gold dust for fanboys warring over which console is best they’re also a fairly ludicrous overstatement, especially coming hot off the heels of the showcase.
As with everything else to do with the acquisition, it’s always very unclear whether the officials Microsoft is talking to understand how the games industry works and if they realise that the Xbox’s situation is being exaggerated.
That makes the results of the court case very difficult to predict, but whichever way it goes it could finally be the beginning of the end for the whole question of whether Xbox are allowed to buy Activision Blizzard or not.
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