Ubisoft’s reply is like the best they could do to butter up MS 
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Sony was perfectly happy when the PS4 was selling to casuals on the back of CoD marketing rights, early beta access, exclusive or timed exclusive DLC, etc. Their framing here is super weak.
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Sony does not have a very solid foundation in their arguments there (can dismantled relatively easily). They are literally one sentence away from “Microsoft is 2T dollar company, and we are 100b - it is unfair”
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I think its important to remember that Sony is a business and any business is going to state their case because it is their duty to do so. They likely know the arguments are flimsy, but the also have to make them in the interest of their business. The certainly know as well as anyone that the deal is likely going through.
Not to mention it is a double edge sword. If you push to hard against this deal, you certainly would like to make similar deals of your own (within your capability to do so), so you likely don’t want to much pushback on your own moves.
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Bungie must be feeling proud to join Sony where they can’t make even imagine to rival a game like CoD in the same gener
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Yeah they do give that vibe. Granted, I get why they’d wanna be extra whiny given the context of what they are replying to, but still it seems rather pathetic. They have a decent enough argument to make wrt saying it is anti-competitive for their main competitor to have full control over an IP that represents a huge chunk of their revenue stream…but MS can just keep those games on PSX and that argument disappears.
Their argument about Game Pass being too strong is stupid too since MS grew that from nothing 6 yrs ago. Sony could have followed suit at any point instead of waiting for it to get this mature.
They also mentioned the ‘games will be worse’ argument as if they pulled it straight from twitter, lol. So on the one hand, CoD will be the kind of game no other developer could possibly make or compete with quality-wise and yet it will also be dramatically less quality due to being on Game Pass…all while their own in-house games like MLB are themselves on Game Pass and Destiny is F2P (as will be other Sony games in the near future no doubt)…but those won’t be lessened quality-wise for [reasons].
It doesn’t help them that they have 3rd party contracts in place preventing games from hitting Game Pass for long periods of time too. They paid Capcom buckets of cash to make sure RE8 wasn’t on Game Pass and Sony didn’t even have any sort of competing sub in place for well more than a year after the game launched. They weren’t trying to just compete in good faith there.
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But they have first to prove that it represents the huge chunk of revenue because Sony consists of multiple companies after all and they cannot suddely say that SIE losing some revenue due to competition and that destroys Sony. If it represented 50% of revenue at least - then they would have a point (maybe), but COD is nowhere near that level.
Indeed. That’s why - while they will try to oppose - they will tread carefully because they are involved in too many business practices they are arguing against (they claim how COD is important and big while having exclusive betas, content and so on). Not to mention (and Microsoft rightfully mentioned) 3rf party exclusivity. And that’s without diving deeper into the power of the bigger market share.
In fact it is not in their interests to be honest to be openly aggressive against ABK deal because they might piss off Microsoft for real.
Basically what it boils down to is - I don’t remember who said that but - Sony is upset that competition exists
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I suspect if this ‘insider’ did know something two years ago, it was probably just FF and KOTOR.
Outside of Street Fighter there haven’t really ever been any third party exclusives I have been ‘wowed’ by.
Spider-Man and Wolverine had more of a wow moment for me, plus I find it more frustrating that they are exclusive when it’s licensed IP (Marvel should have stipulated multi-platform IMO).
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IIRC they said that Game Pass will be harmful for consumers (lol), the only one who is gonna be “harmed” by bad or mediocre games ending up on the service is gonna be Xbox…consumers are not as stupid as Sony thinks (or maybe some of them are since they are gladly paying 10 euros more for “next gen” haptics & reduced loading times I guess). If MS wants Game Pass to grow being cheap won’t be enough, they should strive for quality software and they are well aware of that.
Also since no one at Sony seems to know jack shit about their biggest competitor’s strengths and weaknesses someone please send them the Metacritic (which they love so much) average score of last year’s Xbox 1st party games. They surely can’t be that clueless…can they? 
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Indiana Jones will be an Xbox exclusive. So that’s a start at least.
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Has it since been confirmed as an exclusive? I read something a while ago which basically suggested that MachineGames pitched it as a multi-platform game to Disney.
Nope not confirmed. It has to be though, considering Disney gives PlayStation exclusive games, no reason to think Indiana Jones would be the exception.
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True, Xbox has also had exclusive Disney games before (Kinect). These days anything can happen IMO.
He told later that he meant Starfield. Basically he heard the rumor that Sony was trying to get Starfield exclusive (whether timed or not, I don’t remember) and that was what shocked him.
But you can look at what Sony wanted to moneyhat
- Deathloop
- Ghostwire
- Forspoken
- KOTOR
- FF16
- Starfield (did not work out)
And I don’t remember what else. Basically almost every big third party game. Then we have to include marketing deals with COD, FIFA, NBA, GTA…
It was a crazy start of the gen if it happened without delays and so on.
P.S. liked the memes that this topic generated on twitter
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They were attempting , but luckily not many fell through for them. I do feel tides have changed and Sony can’t just moneyhat games to be timed permanent. I think market gape is to thin for Sony to throw their weight like they did last gen and early this gen.
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Those games are created by Playstation, their studio, and they pay for a license. It’s not a third party game that was gonna release on Xbox but Sony money hatted it, I don’t see how it’s frustrating. Xbox is free to do some similar if they wanted.
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They likely did that already. There was lots of redacted data in the docs for the non-public version (we only get to see the public version). They don’t need to meet some 50% threshold to have a good argument to make there tho. Just would presumably need to argue that lacking that revenue would inhibit their ability to compete in some way. Best Sony can hope for is a consent decree to ensure CoD doesn’t go exclusive but MS would gladly sign that and make their argument irrelevant.
Yup. As is their most hardcore fanbase. Colin Moriarty is an archetypal example at this point. It makes me wonder if Nintendo’s fanbase acted this way when Sony took over with PSX. It’s just a super bad look.
No I think I read somewhere that they literally argued the game quality would be lessened. I’ll try finding the actual quote later when I’m less busy. It’s just another hilarious assertion from Sony here, lol.
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It is still nowhere near level where it would be considered a huge chunk of revenue. SIE made 20b+ from gaming, while the whole ABK made 8b (where COD from all the platforms is around 30-40% probably). So it is nowhere near a level where Sony can argue that their life depends on COD (especially where Nintendo exists without COD). That’s competition.
Especially in the world where they literally aggressively moneyhat games (leveraging their market share) and they don’t want to open these discussions much 100%.
In fact I think Sony’s theatrics might cause Microsoft to be more aggressive regarding COD.
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It’s just my personal opinion? I’d rather 3rd party licensed games weren’t exclusive to any platform, whether that be Xbox or PS.
The majority of licensed games aren’t exclusive to ‘X’ platform including another of Sony’s games MLB The Show. Granted there are some exceptions for example the original KOTOR.
It just doesn’t make much sense to me why Disney were willing to go the exclusivity route on Marvel when they would have made a tonne of money if it was multi-platform.
But yes you’re right Xbox could have done it too. In my eyes it’s no different than third party deals like FF, therefore if PS are going to do it Xbox might aswell do it too.
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