Microsoft Yanked Forthcoming Game’s PlayStation Port To Make It Exclusive
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.