Thursday September 14, Microsoft, by wanting to transmit to the Californian courts elements of the file in the lawsuit opposing it to the American competition authority, mistakenly sent him around a hundred emails and presentations for internal use. These were then made available online on a site hosted by the courts, before finally being removed on Tuesday September 19.
“Microsoft is responsible for this involuntary provision”, assured Douglas Farrar the same dayhead of public affairs within the competition authority, who is currently suing Microsoft in the hope of blocking the American giant’s takeover of video game publisher Activision Blizzard.
In an internal memo obtained by the specialized site The VergePhil Spencer, director of Xbox, Microsoft’s “video games” division, recognizes from his teams that “several documents submitted to the court as part of the proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard were revealed in error”. However, he specifies that “many of these emails are several years old, and [que] our plans have evolved since then.”
Plans and “ideas in the air”
Among the hundred documents mistakenly made available to the public, qualified by The Verge as “biggest leak in Xbox history”email exchanges between the company’s senior executives reveal some of their plans and avenues for reflection for the next five years.
In particular, a new version of the Xbox Series X console is shown, planned for the end of 2024, and accompanied by a new controller equipped with an accelerometer and haptic feedback. In a presentation intended for internal use, other longer-term plans are discussed, such as the hypothesis of a “generation of hybrid games, capable of taking advantage of the combined power [d’une console] and the cloud »described as the “next generation” of Microsoft consoles.
Documents attributed to Microsoft subsidiary ZeniMax Media and dated 2020 mention a number of previously unannounced games, such as Doom Year Zero, Ghostwire: Tokyo 2 or Dishonored 3, as well as remasters ofoblivion and of Fallout 3. Among these older documents, there is also an email dated summer 2020 and called “Random thought”, an informal conversation between company executives discussing the possibility for Microsoft to buy the Japanese giant Nintendo, judging that it would be a ” good choice “ and that Microsoft would be “the American company best placed to do it”.