Nintendo Files Protective Order To Hide Information FTC Almost Leaked

Nintendo has filed an interesting request, as possibly the last interesting footnote to the FTC federal case vs the Microsoft Activision deal.

As you may remember, FTC moved to have the case heard by District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, and to get the case rushed to reach the deal deadline of July 18. The FTC lost their case, but the pertinent detail is how quickly they went through the case.

As shared by Florian Mueller, this was the text of Nintendo’s request:

“Non-party Nintendo of America Inc. (“Nintendo”) moves for a protective order “to keep sealed” information designated confidential in Plaintiff FTC’s initial proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law.

Nintendo asserts and the record supports that the FTC did not file the requisite motion requesting to seal another party’s material.”

Now, unfortunately for Nintendo, the request was actually denied, presumably by Judge Corley as well. Apparently, the FTC filed a partially redacted version of the document, and Nintendo did not make the argument that the unredacted portion is supposed to be confidential.

This seems like it was a genuine mistake on the FTC’s end, but whatever this document was, it apparently hasn’t been shared online with the broader gaming public.

What we know is that other gaming companies like Microsoft are aware that Nintendo is working on the successor to the Nintendo Switch, and they have their own hunches on how powerful that next console is, and when it could be possibly announced or released.

But other companies’ speculation does not make for a release of confidential information. It’s possible that there is something out there that observers like Florian simply hadn’t realized was confidential in nature.

Unless other media figure out the process to find this information and make it public, however, we probably won’t know what this is. It also isn’t clear if the effort would be worthwhile.

Florian himself believes, based on his own following of the case, that the FTC’s interest is in the ten-year Call of Duty contract Nintendo signed with Microsoft, and not the next Nintendo console at all.

In any case, this all became an issue because FTC either misplaced their paperwork to make Nintendo’s documents confidential, or they were negligent enough to forget to do it at all. If it’s the latter, Nintendo may eventually figure it out and refile to get that protective order.

It would certainly be strange if this one case turns out to create leaks and headaches for Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.