Of course, the actual nature of that conversation is totally unknown, and it's entirely possible that it consisted largely of Microsoft saying "Hey, we'd like to put Game Pass on Switch," followed by Nintendo saying "No" about as quickly as it's possible for a major corporation to turn down a business proposal from a multi-trillion-dollar company. The only things the Game Pass team could have been discussing with Nintendo were either putting Nintendo's games on Game Pass - and let's just dismiss that one out of hand, shall we, since the chances of Nintendo's games turning up on someone else's platform are about as likely as the Louvre agreeing to lend you the Mona Lisa to spruce up your downstairs toilet for a few months - or putting Game Pass on Nintendo's console. The Game Pass team are specifically mentioned in this context, so the discussion seemingly wasn't about something more technical and behind-the-scenes, like Nintendo using Microsoft's cloud services in a more general sense (following in the footsteps, perhaps, of the deal Microsoft has with Sony to provide cloud services). The discussion surrounding the redactions is all related to Microsoft's struggle to get xCloud game streaming services onto iOS (which it ultimately failed to do, as Apple insisted that every game on xCloud had to be evaluated as a separate submission to the App Store), so there's only one sensible interpretation of what was said in the redacted portions - they must refer to discussions between Microsoft and Nintendo about putting xCloud on Nintendo's Switch. That was certainly the case this week with the redaction of portions of a deposition from an Xbox business development representative - redactions which Axios Gaming's Stephen Totilo reported had been made due to revealing commercially sensitive information about Nintendo. The ongoing legal battle between Epic and Apple has resulted in all sorts of interesting details about the industry's inner workings being made public, but sometimes, it's the information you can't see that's the most interesting of all.
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