Leaked Xbox emails suggest Spencer keen to acquire Valve and Nintendo
Microsoft accidentally leaked internal documents that revealed Phil Spencer's interest in acquiring a number of publishers in 2020, including Nintendo.
Following Microsoft's win in its case against the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) earlier this year in regards to the Microsoft Activision deal, a number of documents have leaked out including a new Xbox Series X refresh, a new Xbox Wireless Controller, and a number of unreleased titles in the works. However, one of the biggest pieces of news from this spill is a leaked email which has revealed that Xbox head Phil Spencer was interested in buying Nintendo, Valve, and Warner Bros Games prior to Microsoft buying Bethesda.
A leaked email from Phil Spencer to Microsoft EVP and commercial chief marketing officer, Takeshi Numoto, and Microsoft's chief marketing officer, Chris Capossela details his intent. It was included in the confidential, unredacted, internal documents Microsoft inadvertently submitted as exhibits in the FTC case, and has since been scrubbed from the website.
Senior editor of The Verge, Tom Warren, posted the email on Twitter, breaking the news. The email from Spencer starts off addressing Takeshi, saying "I totally agree that Nintendo is THE prime asset for us in Gaming" before citing the "unfortunate" situation – that "Nintendo is sitting on a big pile of cash".
Spencer also states that a former Microsoft board of directors member, ValueAct Capital, had been acquiring shares in Nintendo, but notes that a hostile takeover would not be a good move. ValueAct bought $2 billion in Microsoft in 2013 with a view to securing a spot on the board (via Valens Research) – and it succeeded the following year when Microsoft announced that Mason Morfit, president of ValueAct Capital, had been appointed to the company’s board of directors and its audit committee.
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Spencer concludes that "getting Nintendo would be a career moment" and that "it's just taking Nintendo a long time to see that their future exists off their own hardware. A long time..."
While he doesn't go into detail in this email, Spencer also mentions that the Microsoft board of directors has seen a writeup on the possibility of acquiring Valve (which has always been a private company and still is). Details were also disclosed of two active merger and acquisition discussions with Warner Bros. Interactive and ZeniMax Media – parent company of Bethesda.
"I won't say WB or Zeni is Nintendo but both are for sale and gettable by us if things align" he says, which they did when Microsoft bought Bethesda just months later. Reports about Microsoft wanting to buy Warner Bros. surfaced around this time from The Information's Jessica Toonkel. The email seems to line up with that report, which stated that IP ownership would be the biggest hurdle, as the majority of WB Games' studios are working on Warner Bros. IP like Batman, The Suicide Squad, and Wonder Woman – which wouldn't be included in a WB Games buyout.
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The first thing to keep in mind is that these emails are from three years ago, before Microsoft bought Bethesda, and well before Microsoft started the buyout of Activision Blizzard last year. It's highly unlikely Microsoft would attempt to buy Nintendo after spending almost $70billion on Activision; and it's even more unlikely that a buyout would be approved following the Microsoft Activision deal.
That being said, it paints a grim picture of what's going on over at Microsoft. Rather than investing money in making sure titles actually come out at a high quality and reasonable rate, it looks like the philosophy is to buy out the competition. A future where Nintendo is owned by Microsoft sounds like the worst possible outcome considering how low the quality has been coming out of the company's major releases like Halo Infinite, Starfield, and Redfall.
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