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More Confusion Over Xbox Exclusives As Reports Of Game Ports Start Leaking
from the phil-us-in dept
I don’t know what it is or why it is, but the Xbox team just can’t seem to communicate clearly when it comes to how it’s going to handle exclusivity in games for its console. After it gobbled up several game studios and publishers, most recently Activision Blizzard, the messaging from the Xbox team about what games would be exclusives has been muddy at best. It was less than two years ago that we watched them do a full flip-flop on exclusives, going from saying that they’re not doing them, to then doing them, only to then say that long-term the company would ween itself off of exclusives because they don’t comport with the company’s “philosophy.”
Xbox chief Phil Spencer specifically mentioned that the then-upcoming game Starfield would be a Microsoft exclusive game, which it has been since its release. Except that game, along with some future titles, are now the subject of supposed leaked information that they’d be coming to the PlayStation console.
After a number of high-profile leaks suggesting Xbox is looking into porting a number of first-party titles to other platforms, Phil Spencer has taken to Twitter to clear the air. The head of Xbox tells fans that they should look forward to a “business update event” next week, though he did not provide details on exact timing or the nature of the updates. Considering the widespread coverage the rumors of Xbox games going to other platforms have gotten, it’s likely that this event will officially announce the news.
The rumors in question include reports from The Verge that MachineGames is “considering” a release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PlayStation 5 sometime after the game launches on PC and Xbox. Other reports from XboxEra alleged similar plans for a PlayStation 5 port of Starfield that will release sometime after the Shattered Space DLC.
And so this has sent Spencer scrambling to give some update where he will, in theory, possibly provide some actual answers into whether these games would get PlayStation ports or not. The reality might be more of the same, which is to say vague words about what might happen at some point, which Microsoft will then go back on.
But what can’t be argued is that the company has in any way communicated its plans clearly. And Spencer feigning as though he’s heard that complaint just doesn’t cut it.
The full tweet from Spencer is as follows: “We’re listening and we hear you. We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”
We’ll see what comes of this “business update”, I suppose. The problem here is that Spencer has already tanked his own credibility to such a degree that I don’t know if any serious person will take him at his word.
Filed Under: phil spencer, playstation, ports, starfield, video games, xbox
Companies: microsoft
You Still Don’t Own What You Bought: Purchased TV Shows From PS Store Go Bye Bye
from the you-bought-the-right-to-be-disappointed dept
Thank you for joining us for your latest lesson in how you don’t actually own the things you buy when you buy them digitally. Over a year ago, we discussed a story out of Germany and Austria where a deal expired between Sony and movie distributor StudioCanal, which resulted in 100s of movies being delisted and deleted, both from the PlayStation Store and from the PlayStations of those who bought them. Yup! People bought a thing, got a thing, and then had that thing clawed back from them once the licensing agreement wasn’t renewed. You can guess for yourself whether members of the public who “bought” these movies had any idea that them disappearing long after purchase was even a possibility, but don’t overthink it, you know the answer.
But maybe you thought, “Sucks for Germany, but that wouldn’t happen here in America.” Well, turns out it sucks for some of us, too, as the exact same thing happened here, only with shows and content produced by Discovery and purchased through the PlayStation Store.
The latest pothole in the road to an all-digital future was discovered via a warning Sony recently sent out to PlayStation users who purchased TV shows made by Discovery, the reality TV network that recently merged with Warner Bros. in one of the most brutal and idiotic corporate maneuvers of our time. “Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library,” read a copy of the email that was shared with Kotaku.
It linked to a page on the PlayStation website listing all of the shows impacted. As you might imagine, given Discovery’s penchant for pumping out seasons of relatively cheap to produce but popular reality TV and documentary-based shows, there are a lot of them. They include, but are not limited to, hits such as: Say Yes to the Dress, Shark Week, Cake Boss, Long Island Medium, Deadly Women, and many, many more.
And MythBusters, too, which feels like that show missed an opportunity to bust the myth that you own what you bought when you purchase something digitally. The reality is that there is no good way to actually retain these shows in cases like this. Some that “bought” Discovery content are freaking out, understandably.
“Is there a way I can save this content?” asked one panicked PlayStation user on Reddit. “I use PS4…But I have bought many seasons of shows such as Dual Survival that I do not wish to lose. I was actually under the impression since I owned it, I wouldn’t ever lose it…”
Whatever else is true, it’s obvious that platforms aren’t doing nearly enough to actually inform customers of what they’re buying, leasing, renting, whatever. It would be one thing if this content was ripped away and everyone on all sides realized that was a possibility. That just isn’t the case.
And just as in the Germany instance, there’s no chance that any of this comes with any refunds or givebacks. Well-meaning customers who paid money for this content simply don’t have it anymore. And it just isn’t like having a Netflix account or something like that, where the product catalogue is constantly in flux. It’s people who are buying a show, or the season of a show. But they’re really not. They’re renting it until some combination of Sony and the licensee decides they’re not.
And that just isn’t a tenable future.
Filed Under: culture, licensing, ownership, playstation, tv shows
Companies: sony, warner bros. discovery
PlayStation Ends Its ExTwitter Sharing Integration, Likely Due To API Payment Requirement
from the X-it-stage-right dept
When it comes to the big 3 of the video game industry — Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony — the circle is now complete when it comes to integrations with ExTwitter. Late last year, Nintendo killed off parts of its own integration not just with then-Twitter, but with Facebook as well. But then ExTwitter abruptly announced earlier this year that free access to its API was going to be cut off, replaced instead by a tiered payment scheme depending on what level of integration the user would need. Almost immediately afterwards, Xbox cut off the ability to share content via ExTwitter.
And now Sony has removed the PlayStation’s integration with ExTwitter as well, almost certainly for the same reason. Somewhat interestingly, Sony’s DS4 controller came with a button specifically called the “share” button, which allows you to screencap images or videos to your console to then share on social media. That button seems to have gotten measurably less useful now.
Sony said it is removing support for Elon Musk’s X/Twitter from its PlayStation game consoles, effective next week. The company announced the change in a notice posted Monday on its website.
“As of November 13, 2023, integration with X (formerly known as Twitter) will no longer function on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles,” the message on Sony’s website reads. “This includes the ability to view any content published on X on PS5/PS4, and the ability to post and view content, trophies and other gameplay-related activities on X directly from PS5/PS4 (or link an X account to do so).”
As ExTwitter’s valuation sits at somewhere around half of what it was at the time Elon Musk bought the platform, a trendline of the wider world not seeing enough value in the platform to cough up what he’s asking for to use it, well, ain’t great. The entire premise of a social media company is built upon user activity and engagement. Users have begun to leave the platform, including those that may have used it in conjunction with these 3rd party integrations that are likewise going away. Advertisers are going away, in part because of the toxic hellhole that ExTwitter has become, and in part due to the declining user base and engagement of existing users.
Musk can rail against the evil woke mind virus of death and destruction, or whatever strawman farce he wants to cook up to explain why everything he does is the bestest this week, but the platform is in decline in very measurable ways.
Musk closed his 44billiondebt−ladentakeoverofTwitterinOctober2022,afterTwittersuedhimtocompletethedealattheagreed−onterms.Thecompany,sincerechristenedXCorp.,is[nowworth44 billion debt-laden takeover of Twitter in October 2022, after Twitter sued him to complete the deal at the agreed-on terms. The company, since rechristened X Corp., is [now worth 44billiondebt−ladentakeoverofTwitterinOctober2022,afterTwittersuedhimtocompletethedealattheagreed−onterms.Thecompany,sincerechristenedXCorp.,isnowworth19 billion, according to a notice sent last month to employees eligible for stock grants.
Were PlayStation gamers using the ExTwitter integration all that much? Perhaps not. But “some” is a higher value than “absolutely none, because Sony killed it off.” And when you’re bleeding money and usership, well, this is one more data point in a story of how to kill a once-useful and potentially successful platform.
Filed Under: api, playstation, sharing, social sharing
Companies: sony, twitter, x
Former Sony CEO Discusses Risks Of Video Game Industry Consolidation And Game Preservation
from the preach! dept
There’s a lot to get to in this post, so we’re going to dive right in. Shawn Layden is a former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, otherwise known as essentially the boss of Playstation. He has made several appearances as of late, both in a keynote speech for a video game industry summit and in a recent interview for the LAN Parties podcast, discussing two topics we’ve covered regularly here at Techdirt: video game preservation and industry consolidation. And while I’ve personally had some challenging things to say about Layden in the distant past, in both instances he’s making some very insightful points on both topics.
On the topic of consolidation, it’s important to note, as Kotaku did, that Layden has long been a critic of the traditional AAA blockbuster game. He rightly notes how that style of game has really become a stagnant piece of the industry. You can see evidence of this everywhere, from the success of indie studios and their often shorter games, to game concepts that go beyond the “amazing graphics and 70 hours of gameplay” standard and instead focus on replayability, and so-called “forever games”, such as the Minecrafts and Rimworlds that are out there.
So it’s within that larger context that he recently warned the period of studio/publisher consolidation that the gaming industry is going through brings with it a lot of risk.
“My concern around consolidation is that often it impacts creativity. For instance, it takes some kind of small, independent, wildhorse studios and brings them into a larger conglomerate and essentially time slows down the bigger you are, time slows down,” Layden said. “I’m also concerned when studios get bought and instead of enabling a way to create their game, they maybe get absorbed into a larger enterprise that’s making a larger game, you know, how many studios are involved in making blockbuster games that will stagger the mind.”
He said that in specific instances, acquisitions can save studios from shutting down and he’s glad to see that, but he remains worried about the lasting impact of the larger trend. “I’m just concerned about what it does to the creativity urge inside of the studios, and can they keep that sort of independent creativity alive or do they just get absorbed into the larger whole? Time will tell, but it’s a bit concerning. When you go from hundreds of voices to dozens of voices, you lose some voices,” Layden said.
He specifically goes on to call out the consolidation of game genres that has come along with consolidation within the industry. His overall point is that these massive acquisitions we’ve begun to see largely only make sense if the acquiring company is looking to purchase successful game franchises with an eye towards pumping out sequels and titles that mirror those successes. That means you’re not going to get free-thinking creativity in the studios that get acquired and will instead see those studios turned into gaming factory lines pumping out tried and true types of products. And as those genres continue to get stale, all that consolidation will lead to consolidated stagnation of interest from the public.
As to the topic of game preservation, well, all I can say is that Layden’s public comments on the topic are a breath of fresh air coming from someone tied to the industry.
“Preservation is important,” Layden said. “I’m hoping that more people in the industry, certainly the big players, begin to realize that there’s an obligation and responsibility. This isn’t throw-away stuff we’re making. This is stuff that should be around for a long time because future generations will enjoy it in the same way that we have and it’s criminal that we’re not doing more to protect it.”
While companies have been happy to remaster older games or sell new anthologies like this week’s Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, there’s been no larger unified campaign by publishers and console manufacturers to invest in keeping gaming’s history alive and available. As Layden points out, it rarely helps the bottom line. Culturally, though, it’s an important way for one generation of players to share their passion with the next. Besides, a medium untethered from its past might have a harder time seeing where it goes next.
It may well be impossible to frame the issue any better than that. Of course these content-producing companies are in it all to make money. That is a given. But there is a responsibility, to borrow Layden’s word, to protect the culture that is being created here and the simple fact of the matter is that the industry is by and large shirking that responsibility, pretending like it doesn’t exist. Or pretending like copyright protections are more important than that cultural preservation.
And that is absolutely stupid. Imagine a world in which you could no longer legitimately watch the movie The Maltese Falcon, simply because some Hollywood studio both didn’t bother to ever put it on a medium that would survive modernity and insisted nobody else could either because of its intellectual property rights. Would we accept that from the film industry? Not willingly, I’d argue, though I’m sure we could all find some instances of that very thing occurring. So why are we by and large accepting it for the video game industry?
You really should go check out the full interview if you’re at all interested in the business of video games. At the very least, it’s nice to hear from an industry executive who seems to get it.
Filed Under: consolodation, playstation, shawn layden, video games
Companies: sony
Part 2: Microsoft Bolsters Sony’s Justification For Withholding Console Info In Court Doc
from the whoops dept
The ongoing saga that is Microsoft’s attempt to purchase Activision Blizzard continues! As a brief review of the scoreboard will show: the EU has approved the purchase, the UK’s CMA has blocked it and Microsoft has appealed that decision, and the lawsuit brought by the FTC in the States is currently in the pretrial phase. Last we checked in on the FTC suit, Sony’s Jim Ryan gave a deposition in which he claimed that if the purchase was allowed, that Sony might not share information about any future consoles with Microsoft-owned developers like Activision Blizzard out of fear that Microsoft would use that information, critical to giving developers information needed to make games for those future consoles, in ways that Sony wouldn’t like. In that post, I made clear that this was a bad look for Sony, which has several first-party titles on the Xbox, given its anticompetitive nature in a lawsuit that the FTC is bringing on grounds of the merger being anti-competition.
Now it appears that Microsoft has thrown something of a lifeline to Sony on that front. In a recent pretrial filing from Microsoft, in which it makes the argument that Sony and the FTC are too limited in the consoles that they claim compete with the Xbox series of consoles, Microsoft sure seems confident in the next few consoles Sony plans to release.
In a section of the document tantalizingly subtitled “The Console Market Must Include Nintendo,” Microsoft is taking issue with the FTC’s position that Xbox and PlayStation are in a two-horse race because “they are offered at a similar price.” This, they say, is “unpersuasive,” on the basis of previous Supreme Court rulings (uh-oh), but also that the FTC’s analysis “considers only the high-end models of Xbox (Series X) and PlayStation (standard edition), thereby ignoring the differentiation within Xbox’s console lines.” They make the point that a Series S and a Switch cost the same, and their budget model is fifty bucks less than a Switch OLED.
But then, with a canny dismissiveness, they throw in at the end of the paragraph:
PlayStation likewise sells a less expensive Digital Edition for $399.99, and is expected to release a PlayStation 5 Slim later this year at the same reduced price point.
Now, to be clear, there is a lot of speculation about this already out there in the wild. So it wouldn’t be out of the realm of the reasonable for Microsoft to be simply speculating on a Slim version of the PS5 being on the docket, similar to what Sony did with the PS4.
On the other hand:
The line comes with a footnote adding, “Sony is also anticipated to release a handheld version of the PlayStation 5 later this year for under $300.”
This would be Sony’s Project Q, for which they’ve revealed almost nothing, let alone a street date or price!
There has been some speculation about the handheld as well, but not because it follows the format of previously released PlayStation consoles and their progression to other versions. This very much looks like Microsoft outing Sony’s plans for a next generation series of consoles, including a handheld, which aren’t currently on offer. Press speculation aside, putting this in a court filing when that information isn’t officially public is quite a choice.
And, either way, the optics of this are terrible. At best, it’s Microsoft using a court filing to undercut Sony’s release announcements for future consoles, which isn’t great. At worst, it’s Microsoft tipping its hand that it already has some inside information on these future consoles, possibly from the Zenimax acquisition, which goes some lengths to bolstering Sony’s concerns about how Microsoft is going to use information about future consoles should Sony share that information with them.
You just have to love a gaming industry story where everyone is the bad guy.
Filed Under: antitrust, competition, information sharing, playstation, ps5, ps5 slim, video games
Companies: activision blizzard, microsoft, sony, znimax
Sony Hurts Its Case Against Microsoft Part 1: No Next-Gen Console Information For Activision
from the bad-look dept
The saga of Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard continues. The two biggest remaining hurdles over which Microsoft has to jump to get the deal over the finish line at this point are in the UK with the CMA and in America with the FTC. While Microsoft appeals the CMA’s refusal to allow the deal to move forward, the FTC’s suit is just getting started. We’re just starting to see the content of depositions and hearings at this point and two pretty significant developments have come out of them, neither of them being a particularly good look for Sony.
The first of those for this post is Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan suggesting in a deposition that if the purchase of Activision is allowed, then Sony may no longer share information about future consoles with the developer out of concern of Microsoft learning PlayStation secrets.
If the sale of Activision Blizzard to Microsoft for $69 billion goes through, it could have big consequences for the future of Call of Duty on PlayStation. At least that’s what Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan keeps saying. In a new deposition for the current lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission, the PlayStation executive said the company won’t share PlayStation 6 information with Activision if it eventually becomes part of Xbox.
“We simply could not run the risk of a company that was owned by a direct competitor having access to that information,” Ryan told regulators, as reported by Stephen Totilo at Axios. The CEO also argued that in addition to Sony being unable to share “in-development console features” with Activision, the Call of Duty publisher would have less incentive to develop console-specific features for the PS5 and future devices like the PS6.
On its face, it makes some amount of sense. If Microsoft owns Activision Blizzard, then sharing any future-gen console information with the developer essentially means giving a competitor, Microsoft, insights into Sony’s secrets. Except there are a couple of things of note on this.
First, a huge part of Sony’s complaints about the purchase is that Microsoft could make major game franchises Microsoft exclusives. And this complaint is well-founded, as we just discussed the company doing exactly that with several Zenimax franchises. But… if the fear is that Microsoft makes games Microsoft exclusives, then those developers of those games wouldn’t need or want any information on the upcoming PS6, because the games wouldn’t appear on that platform. Ryan suggesting Microsoft might release a version of CoD that is sub-par on the PlayStation due to not having access to upcoming features both suggests that Sony thinks Microsoft will still release those games on PlayStations, entirely negating its reason for opposing the deal, and is a problem of Sony’s own making. It all rings as being anti-competitive, the very thing Sony is accusing Microsoft of.
And how come this doesn’t seem to be a major challenge when the roles are reversed or other consoles are brought into the equation? Nintendo inked a deal to put CoD on its consoles and this concern never came up. I don’t know if Nintendo gives anyone feature peeks for future consoles, but for whatever reason there was no problem for them. And Sony has first-party titles that appear on Microsoft platforms, so why isn’t this a problem in reverse?
Sony-owned games like Destiny 2 and MLB The Show currently ship on Xbox, and it’s unclear if Microsoft has or will face similar concerns with sharing similar info with Bungie and Sony San Diego Studio when new Xbox hardware is being developed.
There doesn’t seem to be any major problem in those cases, so why is this such a big deal when it’s Microsoft putting out first-party titles on Sony hardware?
At the end of the day, this just wasn’t a particularly good look for Sony. Anticompetitive threats issued in the very case where the major concern is anticompetitive behavior is certainly a strategy of sorts.
Filed Under: antitrust, call of duty, competition, jim ryan, merger, playstation, video games, xbox
Companies: activision blizzard, microsoft, sony
Microsoft Wisely Gets On The Right Side Of History And ‘Right To Repair’
from the right-side-of-history dept
Mon, May 8th 2023 05:30am - Karl Bode
Microsoft has apparently realized that it’s just good business sense to get itself on the right side of history, and the right side of the growing “right to repair movement.” The company has increasingly been urging lawmakers to support the Washington State Fair Repair Act, which would ensure that consumers and indie repair shops have the parts, tools, and documentation to repair their own gear.
Unfortunately, the bill bogged down in the Washington legislature thanks to opposition from both Republicans and Senator Lisa Wellman, a Democrat and former Apple executive. But right to repair activists say that Microsoft’s support of the legislation has started to change the equation:
“We are in the middle of more conversations with manufacturers being way more cooperative than before,” Nathan Proctor, who heads the U.S. Public Research Interest Group’s right-to-repair campaign, told Grist. “And I think Microsoft’s leadership and willingness to be first created that opportunity.”
A long list of companies like John Deere have spent decades trying to monopolize repair options in everything from consumer electronics to medical equipment and agricultural gear. The end result is always higher repair costs, fewer repair options, and more waste. Microsoft and Sony have historically been part of the problem, with efforts to make it harder to repair game consoles.
Many such companies have been waging war on state and federal efforts to make it easier for consumers to fix their own tech hardware. That’s ranged from Apple falsely claiming this will turn states into dangerous meccas for hackers, to the automotive industry falsely claiming that making it easier to access and repair modern cars will be a boon to stalkers and sexual predators.
But the more fiercely companies try to monopolize repair, implement obnoxious DRM, lock down repair manuals and tools, consolidate repair options and drive up costs, the more annoyed consumers, activists, and environmentalists get, and the greater the momentum for meaningful legislation becomes.
While US consumer rights are generally a hot mess right now, the right to repair movement is a refreshing exception. It’s popular, bipartisan, and is only going to accelerate after decades of consumer anger. Companies can either try to swim upstream against it and make things even worse for themselves, or they can follow Microsoft’s (belated) lead and make sure they’re on the right side of history.
Filed Under: independent repair shops, medical, playstation, right to repair, tractors, xbox
Companies: microsoft
Microsoft Yanked Forthcoming Game’s PlayStation Port To Make It Exclusive
from the liar-liar dept
Timing, as they say, is everything. We’ve been talking about Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard a lot lately and for good reason. It’s a huge deal, both in terms of the size of the purchase relative to the video game industry, but also because of what it could mean for the overall competitive marketplace in the industry as well. The regulators have expressed varied levels of concern and Microsoft’s rebuttal to those concerns has mostly been to ink 10-year deals with other platforms to keep the key series Call of Duty non-exclusive, at least for that timeframe. All the while, throughout this and previous acquisitions taking place in a climate of market consolidation, Microsoft executives have made vague, non-committal statements about how it doesn’t actually want to go the exclusivity route with its titles generally.
Take Microsoft’s acquisition of Zenimax/Bethesda, for instance. After Microsoft acquired the game studio for a then eye-popping $7 billion, Xbox’s Phil Spencer said the following.
“I don’t want to be flip about that,” he added. “This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that. Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games. But I’ll also say in the model—I’m just answering directly the question that you had—when I think about where people are going to be playing and the number of devices that we had, and we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base, I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us. Whatever that means.”
Go ahead and sit down with a pen and paper and try to map out what in the actual hell Spencer is even saying there. You’re best bet is to draw a picture of a waffle with a silly face plastered on top of it, because that’s exactly what that statement is. But if you can find anything at all concrete in the statement, it certainly has to be the part in which Spencer indicates Microsoft is not interested keeping groups of people from playing games as a result of its acquisitions. This is the exact argument Microsoft is making to the regulators as it tries to push through the purchase of Activision Blizzard. After all, it can’t be an antitrust or competitive market concern if Microsoft keeps these titles available on these other platforms and doesn’t limit the competition.
But then the next Elder Scrolls game, a beloved franchise, would be an Xbox/PC exclusive. Oops. And now, in the midst of Microsoft arguing it will act in an opposite fashion to regulators around the world, we learn that another Bethesda title was going to have a PlayStation version before Microsoft nixed it post-acquisition.
Due on May 2, 2023, Redfall is an online co-op shooter that features a whole lotta blood-sucking vampires. You play as a slayer who has to use weapons, stakes, magic, and stealth to take down all the vamps and save your small town before it’s too late. The game seems cool and it’s nice to hear that developer Arkane is looking to remove the previously-announced always-online requirement. However, if you are a PlayStation owner, you won’t get to play Arkane’s next big title, even though at one point there was a PS5 port in the works.
Speaking to IGN France (and translated by IGN), Redfall director Harvey Smith explained that once Bethesda was bought by Microsoft in 2020, things changed fast. “We got bought by Microsoft and that was a huge sea change. They said, ‘No PlayStation 5. Now we’re gonna do Game Pass, Xbox, and PC.’”
If you were a regulator, or perhaps the lawyer for a group of gamers suing Microsoft to stop the Activision Blizzard purchase, you’d have to think that the quote above should be center stage in your efforts. I’m picturing this quote on big placards being held up the way that the clowns in Congress do when they want to make some infantile point to the masses.
Timing is everything. At the exact moment that Microsoft is arguing it will not limit competition by taking titles exclusive, here is a concrete example, admitted to publicly by the company that Microsoft acquired, of it doing the exact opposite. The work had already begun on the PlayStation version and Microsoft killed it. All in as direct contradiction to Spencer’s statement could be had with his wishy-washy messaging.
Canceling a PS5 port of a big game like Redfall seems to run directly in opposition to that statement. And while I understand that, duh, Microsoft wants its games to be Xbox-exclusive, that’s not the message the company has been putting out for the last year or so as it’s tried to convince courts and regulatory groups around the world that it won’t make Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive once it completes its separate, nearly $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard King.
Yes, exactly. And now we’ll see just how much attention those regulators are paying to doing their jobs, because if Redfall doesn’t enter the conversation they’re having with Microsoft, then those regulators are merely mechanisms by which rubber stamps are wielded.
Filed Under: antitrust, competition, elder scrolls, exclusives, playstation, video games, xbox
Companies: activision blizzard, microsoft, sony
The Microsoft, Sony Fight Over The Activision Purchase Is Getting Ugly
from the dirty-laundry dept
This took a bit longer than I expected, but the dirty tactics are starting to come out between Microsoft and Sony over the former’s desire to purchase Activision Blizzard. While we’ve been talking about the $69 billion mega-deal for some time, the conversation more recently has focused on three regulatory bodies that have expressed varying levels of concern about the deal: the FTC in the States, the CMA in the UK, and EU regulators. The last of those has begun signaling that the proposed and/or signed deals Microsoft has struck with other platforms to keep Activision games on those systems is likely to win them over. The FTC and CMA have yet to come off of their previously stated positions publicly.
Which is why this is not just a regulatory and business battle, but a PR battle as well. Lulu Cheng Meservey, Activision’s EVP of Corporate Affairs, has decided to chime in by airing out some private business laundry for the public.
Opening the door to allegedly reveal what was said in a closed door meeting between businesses and a regulator is certainly a choice. Predictably, fans of Microsoft are cheering her on, claiming this shows that Sony is acting entirely in bad faith. Fans of Sony are doing the opposite, chiding her for airing this dirty laundry and wondering aloud whether this portrayal of Sony’s words is accurate. For what it’s worth, Sony has yet to confirm or deny the accuracy of the claim as of the time of this writing.
Which is mostly besides the point. This fight is getting ugly. And not just on the Microsoft side, either. Over at the CMA side of things, Sony has been worrying aloud about all kinds of things that Microsoft could do, inadvertently or not, that sound more like conspiracy-mongering rather than having anything concrete to be upset about. For example:
Microsoft might release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where bugs and errors emerge only on the game’s final level or after later updates. Even if such degradations could be swiftly detected, any remedy would likely come too late, by which time the gaming community would have lost confidence in PlayStation as a go-to venue to play Call of Duty. Indeed, as Modern Warfare II attests, Call of Duty is most often purchased in just the first few weeks of release. If it became known that the game’s performance on PlayStation was worse than on Xbox, Call of Duty gamers could decide to switch to Xbox, for fear of playing their favourite game at a second-class or less competitive venue.
That could happen, I suppose. But it would immediately land Microsoft into boiling antitrust waters if there was even a hint that the company sabotaged competitors versions of the game intentionally. And it would really piss off the public generally if that was the view from them as well, doing damage to the CoD franchise as a result. On top of all of that, the deal Microsoft inked with Nintendo, as well as the one proposed to Sony, stipulates that the games would be equal as a product on all systems.
So now we wait for the FTC and CMA to make their decisions. Somehow, though, I expect that this is going to get even uglier before it’s over.
Filed Under: antitrust, call of duty, dirty laundry, licensing, merger, playstation, xbox
Companies: activision, activision blizzard, microsoft, sony
FF16 Dev’s Response To Exclusivity Complaints: ‘Just Buy A PS5!”
from the let-them-eat-playstations dept
We’ve been talking a lot about video game exclusivity over the past couple of years. The sudden uptick in concern over a longstanding practice that ebbs and flows with time is largely related to industry consolidation of studios coming out of the COVID pandemic. In times of financial stress in an industry, that is often when bigger companies gobble up smaller companies that can’t survive whatever the crises is. In this case, Microsoft began gobbling up studios, with Sony following suit. Suddenly everyone had to wonder if certain titles were going to be exclusive to those platforms. The wishy-washy responses to public concern by those big companies far from helped.
Sony appears to be going with exclusivity even outside its acquisition. Final Fantasy 16 is set to drop later this year. Much like the Final Fantasy 7 remake, it was always going to be a timed exclusive for the PlayStation 5.
Scrubbing through some old Final Fantasy XVI trailers, such as the “Awakening” one from September 2020, it was definitely stated that the game is “not available on other platforms for a limited time after release on PS5,” suggesting it could possibly hit other consoles in the future at the very least. Such was the case with the Final Fantasy VII Remake, where the “limited time” window was about a year.
As Kotaku notes, the more recent marketing output for the game has removed much of that language, leading many to have wondered if this was now going to be a purely PlayStation title. FF16’s producer, Naoki Yoshida, was interviewed recently and stated that the game would not come out on PC, unlike recent other games in the series, and instead advised any disappointed PC gamers to simply go out and buy Sony hardware.
Producer Naoki Yoshida, colloquially known as Yoshi-P, was interviewed at a Mahjong tournament over the weekend, where he was asked whether Final Fantasy XVI would come to PC, something Square Enix confirmed when it revealed the game almost two years ago. However, despite that detail found in the footnote text at the bottom of the trailer, Yoshi-P said the release information is wrong, according to a “rough translation” by the Japanese gaming news Twitter account Genki_JPN. In fact, there may not be a PC version coming at all, as Yoshi-P is apparently suggesting folks go out and buy a PS5 instead.
Now, perhaps that “(laughs)” was intended to do more work than it comes off doing by Yoshida. And I certainly hope so, because otherwise his suggestion very much brings to mind the potentially apocryphal quote: “Let them eat cake.”
I should also say that there are plenty of Twitter replies suggesting that people were getting this wrong and he was suggesting that anyone that doesn’t want to wait go get a PS5. I find that slightly hard to believe, given the scrubbing of the marketing material.
Regardless, a company representative being unclear and, frankly, that capricious over public concern about any sort of game exclusivity isn’t a good look. Sony can do as it likes with the game, but the company doesn’t have to come off as uncaring about it, assuming it does in fact care about its customers.
Filed Under: exclusives, final fantasy, final fantasy xvi, naoki yoshida, playstation
Companies: sony