Day 2 of Microsoft vs the FTC has kicked off in style as the head of Xbox Phil Spencer took to the stand to deliver his testimony. The ongoing battle is, of course, due to the FTC attempting to halt Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision-Blizzard.

Phil Spencer unleashed an interesting admission, revealing that one of the biggest reasons Microsoft bought Zenimax in 2020 for $7.5 billion was to ensure Starfield wouldn’t be a PlayStation exclusive.

“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 said. “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.”

Much of Microsoft’s strategy revolves around the idea of portraying Sony as an aggressive company that attempts to keep as many third-party games off of the Xbox as possible, though it could be argued that such tactics are completely normal.

The FTC also grilled Spencer on their concerns that Microsoft would make all future Activision-Blizzard games exclusive to the Xbox. Spencer shot back that even if they did, Sony and Nintendo would still have far more exclusives.

“Sony has a significant catalogue of exclusive games. It’s drastically larger, dramatically larger than what we have on Xbox today. Both Sony and Nintendo’s first-party is stronger than Xbox.” stated Spencer.

The FTC also asked Spencer if the next Elder Scrolls game would be an Xbox exclusive, to which Spencer replied that it was too early to make that decision.