Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer says Starfield is seeing ‘huge demand’

Published

2 years ago

September 6, 2023

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Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, appears at the Political Opening of the Gamescom conference in Cologne, Germany, on Aug. 23, 2023.

Franziska Krug | German Select | Getty Images

Microsoft is seeing “huge demand” for its new Starfield video game, Phil Spencer, the software company’s CEO of gaming, said on Wednesday.

“We think this game is going to be available to literally hundreds of millions of people on the devices that they already own, and looking to make this game as accessible as it can be to players,” Spencer told CNBC’s Steve Kovach.

The game, described as “the first new universe in 25 years” from Microsoft’s Bethesda Game Studios, appeared on Wednesday on PCs, Xbox consoles and other devices accessed through the cloud, for those who pay for the Game Pass subscription service. Microsoft picked up the game through its $8.1 billion acquisition of game publisher ZeniMax, the parent of Bethesda.

While Microsoft is aiming to make its games widely available, the company also wants to ensure that its consoles have some notable attractions as it competes with Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Switch. Gaming accounts for 6% of Microsoft’s revenue, and Xbox content and services revenue grew 5% in the second quarter, faster than Windows, devices and some other parts of the company.

Gaming has taken center stage at Microsoft as the company tries to finalize the $68.7 billion acquisition of publisher Activision Blizzard, which makes Call of Duty and other franchises. The deal hit regulatory snags, but is still poised to close.

Starfield is an expansive open-world game with over 1,000 planets for players to explore as they build and buy spaceships. Before the acquisition, ZeniMax was planning to release the game on PlayStation, Jim Ryan, CEO of the Sony Interactive Entertainment business, said in a taped appearance at a hearing in San Francisco in June in connection the Microsoft-Activision deal.

Ryan said he wasn’t a fan of Starfield becoming a Microsoft exclusive, which would signify that it wouldn’t come to other consoles.

“We’ve had more players for any next-gen exclusive than we’ve had this generation all up,” Spencer said. He was referring to the current consoles, the $500 Xbox Series X and $300 Xbox Series S, which both went on sale in 2020. Those who bought premium editions of the game got early access last week.

Spencer said Starfield is the most wish-listed game the company has had on the Steam game store. On the review website Metacritic, Starfield currently has a score of 86 out of 100, based on 55 reviews from critics.

Spencer said tens of millions of Game Pass subscribers were getting a chance to play Starfield on Wednesday. As of January 2022, Microsoft said Game Pass had over 25 million subscribers.

Spencer stopped short of proclaiming that Starfield would debut on the PlayStation, but he is promising that some of Activision’s most popular titles will remain available on the PlayStation for years to come.

In July, Sony signed an agreement that would keep Call of Duty games on PlayStation for a decade. Microsoft has been working to resolve regulators’ concerns about the pending Activision acquisition by assuring it will keep games on Nintendo consoles, Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming offering and other services.

Microsoft announced plans for the Activision Blizzard transaction in January 2022. It was supposed to close by June 2023, but the companies said in July they had agreed to push back a deadline to complete the deal to Oct. 18.

In August, Microsoft submitted a new proposal to the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority that would involve transferring to game publisher Ubisoft the cloud streaming rights to Activision’s PC and console games for 15 years if the deal closes.

WATCH: Microsoft says it worked hard to address regulatory concerns over Activision Blizzard deal

Technology

Reddit sues AI startup Anthropic for breach of contract, ‘unfair competition’

Published

34 mins ago

June 4, 2025

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Reddit sues AI startup Anthropic for breach of contract, 'unfair competition'

Mateusz Slodkowski | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Reddit is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic for what it’s calling a breach of contract and for engaging in “unlawful and unfair business acts” by using the social media company’s platform and data without authority.

The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco on Wednesday, claims that Anthropic has been training its models on the personal data of Reddit users without obtaining their consent. Reddit alleges that it has been harmed by the unauthorized commercial use of its content.

Reddit opens the complaint by calling Anthropic a “late-blooming” AI company that “bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry.” Reddit follows by saying, “It is anything but.”

“For its part, despite what its marketing material says, Anthropic does not care about Reddit’s rules or users: it believes it is entitled to take whatever content it wants and use that content however it desires,
with impunity,” the filing said.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Since the generative AI boom began with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, Reddit has been at the forefront of the conversation. Its 20-year-old site is filled with user-generated information about hundreds of thousands of topics and has been a main source of training for large AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude.

Reddit announced a partnership with OpenAI in May that will allow the company to train its AI models on Reddit content. The company has a similar agreement with Google.

In the lawsuit, Reddit said that “other giants in the AI space understand a respect Reddit’s rules,” which is why it has entered into formal partnerships with companies like OpenAI and Google. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a former board member and major shareholder in Reddit, with a stake now valued at well over $1 billion.

Reddit has established rules dictating how its data can be used, which the company says in the filing “are clearly memorialized” in the company’s user agreement.

“While Reddit has always been of the mind that the community should be open to all humans looking for connection and community, it has never allowed its platform and the countless communities who find a home on it to be appropriated by commercial actors seeking to create billion-dollar enterprises and offering nothing in return to Reddit and its users,” the complaint says.

Reddit said the aim of the lawsuit is to seek damages and compel Anthropic to abide by its contractual and legal obligations.

This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates.

Technology

Amazon to invest $10 billion in North Carolina data centers in AI push

Published

2 hours ago

June 4, 2025

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Amazon to invest billion in North Carolina data centers in AI push

A power substation near the LC1 CloudHQ data center in Ashburn, Virginia, on March 27, 2024.

Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon plans to spend $10 billion on new data centers in North Carolina to expand its artificial intelligence infrastructure, the company said Wednesday.

Amazon has earmarked up to $100 billion this year on capital expenditures, with the lion’s share going to AI-related projects. Similar to other major tech companies, Amazon is racing to build out its capacity to power AI tasks in order to keep pace with rivals including Microsoft, Google and OpenAI.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has called generative AI a “once-in-a-lifetime type of business opportunity.”

The investment in North Carolina will create roughly 500 jobs in the state, Amazon said.

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Technology

Microsoft gives LinkedIn chief Roslansky added role running Office

Published

3 hours ago

June 4, 2025

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Microsoft gives LinkedIn chief Roslansky added role running Office

Microsoft is giving LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky a bigger job, expanding his role to include oversight of Office productivity software, CNBC has learned.

Roslansky, who took over LinkedIn five years ago, is becoming executive vice president of Office, reporting to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s executive vice president for experiences and devices, according to a person familiar with the matter. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella informed employees about the change in an email on Wednesday, said the person, who asked not to be named because the email was internal.

In his role as LinkedIn CEO, Roslansky will continue to report to Nadella, the person said.

LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in 2016 for $27 billion, will keep operating as a subsidiary, after generating more than $17 billion in revenue over the past year. Roslansky joined LinkedIn in 2009 and previously worked at Yahoo.

In 2022, Microsoft rebranded its Office 365 productivity software bundle, which includes applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, to Microsoft 365. In addition to overseeing those products, Roslansky’s portfolio will also include the M365 Copilot app, which lets users edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Jha’s group released the app in 2020.

“Office is one of the most iconic product suites in history,” Roslansky wrote in a LinkedIn post. “It has shaped how the world works, literally. The reach and impact of Office are unmatched. I’m coming into this role in a new, exciting era. Productivity, connection, and AI are converging at scale. Both Office and LinkedIn are used daily by professionals globally, and I’m looking forward to redefining ourselves in this new world.”

As part of the organizational change, Microsoft said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president for business and industry Copilot products, and his team will move to Jha’s unit. They were previously part of Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie’s cloud and artificial intelligence group.

Lamanna supervises Dynamics 365 sales and customer service products that compete with Salesforce, as well as the Copilot Studio tool for easily building artificial intelligence agents.

In December, Nadella said that AI agents might become the way that people eventually interact with software systems that were designed for use inside large organizations.

“When was the last time any of us really went to a business application?” he told investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley on their podcast. He said the company pays for a bunch of cloud software applications, but “we hardly use them and somebody in the org is sort of inputting data into it.”

“In the AI age, the intensity goes up because all that data now is easy, right?” Nadella said.

The company’s Productivity and Business Processes segment, anchored by Microsoft 365 subscriptions and LinkedIn, has turned more profitable in the past decade. The unit’s operating margin in the fiscal third quarter exceeded 58%, compared with 33% in 2017. Revenue was up 10% from a year earlier.