As the popular 2000s band Bowling For Soup once said, “high school never ends (oh oh, oh oh oh oh!).” Apparently, Sony executives were big fans of Bowling For Soup because the high school level of drama between Sony and Microsoft has reached sophomoric levels of ridiculousness. In case you are just getting the secondhand gossip here at the Gamer Bytes lunch table, Microsoft is in the middle of acquiring Activision-Blizzard for a staggering $68.7 billion and Sony has major beef with it. Buckle up because here’s the tea.
Last week, in a statement to CADE, Brazil’s regulatory committee, Sony stated that Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard (which includes the Call of Duty (CoD) franchise) would strongly influence consumers’ console buy choices, favoring Xbox over PlayStation. The idea of console exclusive games to influence consumer console choice is nothing new. In fact Sony is the king of console exclusivity (God of War, The Last Of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc…and that’s just the first party list) and has been for generations of consoles. So one would imagine Sony has to have a better argument as to why this acquisition shouldn’t go through, right? Microsoft, in a 27-page response to Sony’s allegations, states Sony is “resentful” of competing with Xbox’s Game Pass monthly subscription service.
Breaking News: Sony isn’t a fan of Microsoft getting developers to release their games on Game Pass for a monthly fee versus paying full price, or as Sony called it, “harmful to consumers and traditional publishers.” Which sounds like Sony is looking for a way to stop Game Pass and that is where Microsoft points the finger back at Sony by stating, “Microsoft’s ability to continue expanding Game Pass has been hampered by Sony’s desire to inhibit such growth. Sony pays for ‘blocking rights’ to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services,” in an August 9th letter to CADE. Meanwhile Xbox Game Pass has surpassed 25 million subscribers and brought in millions of dollars in revenue to the same developers Sony is trying to “protect.”
At the end of the day, the whole issue revolves around money. Sony is afraid of losing the money it gets from gamers that play CoD on PlayStation consoles. Microsoft realized this and hit Sony with the cold, hard truth: it would be unprofitable for Microsoft to pull CoD from PlayStation. That’s right, Microsoft also doesn’t want to lose money and knows it can maximize its profits by keeping CoD on multiple platforms (which seems to be in line with the numerous public statements confirming their intent to keep CoD multi-platform).
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