A story in today’s New York Times, titled “Hollywood Hardball,” dwells on how “aggressive” Microsoft was when it pitched a movie property based on the company’s popular Xbox video game Halo to the major studios. Microsoft’s demands, the story strongly implies, were so unreasonable that they drove the studios away. “To many in Hollywood,” writes Times reporter Laura Holson, “it was a stunning display of hubris on behalf of Creative Artists and its client, Microsoft, which has a reputation for running roughshod over its rivals in the software business.”

Permit me to feel a little skeptical at the implication that the poor, helpless victim studios were roughed up by the Seattle software giant — especially since, as the story makes clear, Microsoft didn’t get the deal it first wanted.

To be fair to Microsoft, another way to understand Holson’s story is this: MS thought they were bringing a huge and valuable property to the studios, and so they put a big price tag on it and tried to preserve the property by seeking creative control. The studios didn’t quite like the deal MS offered, or the terms on which it was being offered, and so most of them balked. This looks remarkably like business as usual, at least so far as one can understand it while being based on the east coast.

Holson operates out of the NYTimes’s LA bureau, I think, and her main sources for her entertainment-business stories are at the studios. The studios hate and fear Microsoft. So naturally the story shapes itself around the theme of Microsoft’s purported overreaching, when (I suspect) the reality is that you have two sets of corporate giants jostling for advantage over a possible megabillion-dollar franchise.

In any case, nothing of what was described in the story strikes me as unusually “hardball,” given who the players are.

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