Microsoft claimed it considered leaving the gaming industry during the Activision Blizzard negotiations

As you know, Microsoft suffered a huge leak yesterday, with tons of secret documents making their way to the public. While many of them were about things that would come later (like remasters of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3, a new Xbox model and next-gen Xbox consoles) - which Phil Spencer late yesterday said were old plans - other documents were about email conversations and the like.

One of them concerned a dialogue between an FTC lawyer and Xbox boss Phil Spencer during the court hearings on Microsoft's attempt to buy Activision Blizzard. Here, Spencer explained that a chart showing Microsoft's path to 100 million subscribers, in which Spencer argued that too little of the pie came from consoles, could cause Microsoft to leave the gaming industry:

"I do not believe that that is what the future Xbox business would look like. This is a presentation from our devices organization to the gaming leadership team, so this is the view from the team that is chartered with building our hardware on what the future business would look like.

I can fairly safely say that if we do not make more progress than this off of console, we would exit the gaming business. If this were the outcome, we would -- I don't believe we'd still be in the business.

A majority of our customers are found off of our own hardware, I would hope by earlier than 2030. So, when you asked me if I agreed with this chart that the light green and blue depending on what colors you see there would have to be much larger much earlier. I would say by FY26, '27 that we should be in that position, or we'd have to make a different decision with the business."

However, it is worth remembering that the statement should be seen in the light of Microsoft trying to buy Activision Blizzard, and that the threat of having to leave the gaming world is therefore used as an argument to convince judges and the FTC. Spencer has previously said that the Activision Blizzard acquisition is not a deal-breaker, and given everything they have already bought during the recent years, it seems unlikely that they would suddenly sell everything again to leave the industry.

Thanks, Wccftech.