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Sony Microsoft PlayStation (Games)

Sony Expects Microsoft To Keep Activision Games Multiplatform 64

Posted by msmash from the hopium dept.
Sony said Thursday that it expected Microsoft to ensure that games from Activision Blizzard are available on non-Microsoft videogame platforms if Microsoft completes its proposed acquisition of Activision. From a report: "We expect that Microsoft will abide by contractual agreements and continue to ensure Activision games are multiplatform," a Sony spokesman said Thursday. Activision supplies some of the most popular games for Sony's PlayStation game console, including the Call of Duty series. After Microsoft on Tuesday announced its acquisition plan, some analysts raised the possibility that Activision games might be available exclusively for Microsoft's own Xbox console and its subscription videogame services in the future.
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Sony Expects Microsoft To Keep Activision Games Multiplatform More

Sony Expects Microsoft To Keep Activision Games Multiplatform

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  • It will be like Bethesda (Score:3)

    by Ambassador Kosh ( 18352 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @11:55AM (#62191787)

    Games that they already have agreements for will still come to PlayStation and future games won't come to PlayStation.

    I don't actually see a problem with that. Sony owns more game studios and their games don't come to Xbox, and they have bought many game studios also.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Kartu ( 1490911 )

      Sony has CREATED those studios. => good for consumers

      Whereas Microsoft just said "oh, I'm so rich, I can buy even something as oversize as Activision". => bad for consumers (former multi plat turning into single plat to compensate for lack of creativity in Microsoft camp)

      • Re:It will be like Bethesda (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Stolovaya ( 1019922 ) <skingiii.gmail@com> on Thursday January 20, 2022 @12:41PM (#62191933)

        I don't really think that makes a difference. Point of origin really doesn't matter, what matters is how the developer is managed. I don't get your logic, if a company created a developer, then it makes it's "good" that they're single platform? You'll have to expand on how that makes sense. And Sony has acquired developers (Insomniac Games comes to mind), so it's not like Sony doesn't do this, too. And with Activision-Blizzard's current management, well, something needed to happen.

        • At least Microsoft and their studies have a MUCH better reputation than Activision-Blizzard for how they treat people. I expect they will work to clean all of that up.

        • Sony famously nurtured their in-house studios for over 2 decades, while at the same time MS killed quite a few of its own. Its only in the last few years they have taken getting devs in-house seriously. Thats the difference. Naughty Dog is straight up where Sony engineers get taught how to wring out their own hardware. They have a very long and deep relationship that MS does not have with its studios.
          • Except there are studios like that with MS where there is a long relationship, like 343 Industries or Playground Studios. So that's not something exclusive to Sony. Not saying MS hasn't killed dev studios, but that too isn't anything unique to MS.

      • Sony has CREATED those studios. => good for consumers

        Bullshit. Naughty Dog has been around since they 80s. They had already created most of Crash Bandicoot before even approaching sony about getting it on the playstation. Sony bought them up many years later. Sony didn't create them.

        Psygnosis was around since the 80s. They were producing games for playstation, sega genesis/saturn, and windows side by side. Sony bought them in the early 90s and then later absorbed them into SCE in the late 90s, where they have only made games for playstation since.

      • That is simply false, more than half of Sony Studios were Acquisitions not creations. They are no different to MS, they have a few inhouse studios they created but they are not the majority of their studios.
      • You might want to go and research a little on Sony Studios. All the big ones were purchases, they have created very few themselves.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Games that they already have agreements for will still come to PlayStation and future games won't come to PlayStation.

      I don't actually see a problem with that. Sony owns more game studios and their games don't come to Xbox, and they have bought many game studios also.

      Activision only makes on real game these days - Call of Duty. All of their studios are working on that title almost exclusively because of the push to well, make lots of money. Even game franchises that make money, but not enough of it, end up

      • I actually expect Microsoft to cut back a bit on Call of Duty to focus a bit on making it better but also diversifying to some of the other IP. Microsoft is trying to push a subscription service and it is not as bound to sell a single game. The same way that Netflix covers a range of tastes instead of just one big thing that does well.

    • I see a problem with both and I should be illegal under antitrust principles. — This is why monopolies are bad.

      Exclusivity deals in general, or any form of crippleware should be illegal.

  • Exclusivity is Anti-Competitive (Score:4)

    by sanosuke001 ( 640243 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @11:56AM (#62191793)

    No developer/publisher (activision/blizzard/bethesda/etc) should be allowed to own a platform (xbox/playstation/nintendo/etc). Same with ISP's and physical infrastructure, cell towers, etc. They should be split into separate companies and told to knock that shit off.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Viol8 ( 599362 )

      That ship sailed long ago. Eg Sony buying CBS records in 1990. There are plenty of other examples.

    • One of the last things Trump's administration did (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday January 20, 2022 @12:39PM (#62191921)
      Was clear the way for Disney to own theaters. To be honest I think Hillary would have done the same. Her husband continued what Reagan started and I don't think Obama cared it either way about anything once he was president. He just kind of steered the ship at best.

      We've had a total breakdown in antitrust law enforcement. This is a result of bad choices in primary elections. I've been voting in primary elections for about 10 or 12 years now and there's been a pro consumer candidate in everyone that I voted for but they lost. They tend to be the more left-wing candidates and the older folks who tend to show up for primary elections vote them down out of a generic fear of increased taxes. Never minded none of them ever make enough money to fall into the brackets that would have to pay those taxes.

      Vote in your primary election. Google the candidates and ask yourself which one is going to sell out and which one isn't. It generally takes me about a half an hour or less to figure out which is which. It is a little annoying because none of them just outright say it. When you look at people like Kirsten Sinema, who's net worth went from 35,000 to over a million in the course of about 8 months you know what's going on. There are candidates who aren't going to do that but you are actually going to have to put a tiny itty bitty bit of effort into finding them and then, here's the hard part, you're going to have to overcome a whole lot of propaganda scaring you about tax increases and regulations and actually vote for the pro-consumer candidates.

      The hard part is the people who are really affected by those tax increases and regulations are super rich and they own everything and they own all the media you are consuming and they're doing everything they can to make sure you don't find and vote for those primary candidates

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ziest ( 143204 )

        Someone please up vote this. Very good advice.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jjbenz ( 581536 )
        right on fellow slashdotter.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        Someone, someday will have to explain this paradox to me:

        We want higher taxes for the rich with promises that it'll be only for the rich.
        But we're whining that the rich do not pay their taxes in the first place.
        We also don't want the rich to leave, because we want their taxes, so we give them discounts on their taxes.
        Meanwhile shit has to be paid so we pay more taxes.

        Do notice that they always seem to omit just exactly whom they think are "the rich". I've heard people say if you're a millionaire you're rich

        • They can leave but they can't take the ball.

          In other words when rich people leave because you demand they have less power and less control over how the economy functions (remember that money in excess to what you can spend is savings but money and access to what you can save is power) you don't just let them take your entire economy with them.

          The Theranos trial showed that the ultra wealthy aren't competent or useful in any way shape or form. Also if you're willing to step outside a certain type of

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            What will take to get you stop posting this garbage on slashdot and go back sitting in the basement marxist circle meetings of the roach filled hell hole you live in?

            • I need to be able to afford a basement. I've been stuck in apartments for years because companies like Black Rock keep buying up all the houses. So how about we start with some common sense laws regarding who can own single-family homes and from there let's restore the subsidies to housing that the baby boomers enjoyed and then cut so they could stick it to the welfare Queens that Reagan kept going on about. Also it'd be really cool with people like you new to history of the phrase welfare Queen and how it
            • But I'm not forced to live in a roach filled hell hole. Also universal healthcare and a proper infrastructure spending program. I want to live in a world where an entire city isn't drinking lead with water in it for over a decade while the rest of the nation just pretends it's not happening.

              Also are you okay? I know you're trying to get a rise out of me and all but really, are you okay?

      • Was clear the way for Disney to own theaters.

        Why would Disney want to do that? They have a streaming service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )
      There was an anti-trust case in the U.S. back in the 1940s [wikipedia.org], which resulted in an effective ban on the movie studios also owning movie theaters. The advent of streaming has more or less ended this prohibition, for better or worse. Overtaken by events, I guess you could say.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

      No developer/publisher (activision/blizzard/bethesda/etc) should be allowed to own a platform (xbox/playstation/nintendo/etc).

      Doesn't necessarily matter. What the summary fails to mention is that Call of Duty is currently a PlayStation exclusive: Sony paid Activision a ton of money to make it that way.

      As long as platform owners have control over what's allowed to run on their platforms, they can exert pressure on developers. A lot of developers release "exclusives" for certain platforms, not because they can't port them to other platforms, but because there are financial incentives for sticking to a single platform. Apple is pulli

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stikves ( 127823 )

      This sounds good... until reality hits.

      Without Microsoft publishing Halo back in the day, nobody would invest in an Xbox. No game studio would develop on an unknown new console with zero users. And no users would buy a console with zero games.

      That is why first party development and publishing is pretty much required on any gaming console.

      And Microsoft buying Activision has happened after they gave up copying Sony for one off deals (no Street Fighter V on the Xbox, delayed Call of Duty packs, and so on). If

  • Hmmm. (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )

    Microsoft could abide by that if they release updates only for the XBox and let other games bitrot. They're still technically available, then. There are lots of ways Microsoft could abide by the agreement and yet not actually provide the games in any meaningful way. Alternatively, Microsoft is rich enough to not abide at all, Sony would have no effective way to sue.

  • Is there any obligation for Microsoft to ensure the experience on PlayStation is as good or the games as well optimized as they are on Xbox? If I were Sony I wouldn't expect any real effort on Microsoft's part going forward. I wouldn't be surprised if developers don't get as much time to polish the PS5 version so that it makes the Xbox look better by comparison. Good luck taking that to court.

    • Look at Bethesda open world games on PlayStations. They have always been buggier on PlayStation than the Xbox versions have been and apparently even today the PlayStation is harder to develop for than the Xbox is. Mostly I would expect even less effort to go into the PlayStation side and more games to release on Xbox and PC at the same time.

      • Bethesda is just one datapoint though and given Bethesda's history of bugs in all of their open world games, I would not take that as an indication of a larger trend. As for PS being harder to develop, this survey a few years ago [forbes.com] seemed to suggest that despite the challenges, developers were eager to work on PS.
      • Because Sony insisted on being able to do Blu-ray and wanted to sell high definition TVs, and that required some ultra high fast ram to make up for the fact that the chips at the time just weren't capable of processing Blu-ray all that well at the price they were trying to reach. Since that memory was expensive as hell they split the memory pool into 256 megs of fast RAM and 256 megs of slower ram.

        The split architecture was a nightmare for open world games that had to do all sorts of shenanigans shiftin

        • You are very likely correct about this. I just thought I had read that the dev tools for PlayStation where not as good as the dev tools for Xbox. The while the PlayStation is not hard to develop for that it is easier to develop for Xbox.

          • I don't think anyone would be surprised to learn that the developer tools from Sony would not be as good as developer tools from Microsoft, who has been in the business of creating developer tools and IDEs for like 40 years now, as well as has over 20 years experience in making developer-friendly gaming-specific libraries (DirectX).

          • the new Playstations are literally XBoxes. They run Direct X.
      • Bethesda games have been buggy messes regardless of platform. I also don't think they've released any games since their acquisition by Microsoft. Their next game, Starfield, isn't coming out on Sony's console either based on what they've announced so far.

    • Is there any obligation for Microsoft to ensure the experience on PlayStation is as good or the games as well optimized as they are on Xbox? If I were Sony I wouldn't expect any real effort on Microsoft's part going forward. I wouldn't be surprised if developers don't get as much time to polish the PS5 version so that it makes the Xbox look better by comparison. Good luck taking that to court.

      Microsoft does not have to engage in bad faith to screw Sony. They merely have to do ports after launch as opposed to simultaneous releases. Basically the porting team either starts after the main development team is finished or the porting team works along side the main development team during development. Porting to PlayStation after an Xbox launch pretty much guarantees a 12-18 month gap between Xbox and PlayStation releases. Things may get a little faster after a few ports as the porting team's compatib

  • And now they don't want it to happen to them.

    Insomniac Studios comes to mind - they produced Sunset Overdrive (Xbox exclusive), then Sony buys them and locks them down to PS only from there on out.

    What I hope to see come of this is an opening up from both sides to support each other's platforms. They both can win in that case since the software will sell on the other platform, but it's going to take a lot to get Sony to budge from their stance on being isolated.

  • MS should be able to do with their IP what they want. Sony has PLENTY of their own IP that they don't release to XBox or other platforms.

    This is like Google complaining about Apple's iMessage. Oh, NOW you support cross platform development. Sure.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dmay34 ( 6770232 )

      Heck, this has gone on for decades now. I'm old enough to remember that Halo was first introduced and demo'ed at MacWorld! It was supposed to be an Apple Mac exclusive title, until MS bought it and made it an XBox exclusive instead.

  • oh wait, you're serious, let me laugh even harder.

    Once Microsoft owns gaming except them to wall off the garden. Prices will immediately raise 30%, the indies will die out because you'll need Microsoft's permission to make games (via a cryptographic signature and DMCA lawsuits if you manage to get around it). They'll be a handful of hobbyists on old hardware until it all dies out (and only the really old stuff is repairable).

    What I don't get is how and why everybody, even the people on this forum wh

    • I wouldn't mind a mere price increase. I mind that when MS buys a property, they immediately make you get a Microsoft account, they move to make things subscriptions, they break compatibility where it used to exist, etc. etc.

      I miss the days of even PC games that when they shipped, that was it. No constant online updates to screw around with things (so they were generally higher quality out of the box; I will admit that the final quality of games with online patches is higher than earlier games' original sta

  • What Sony says and what they expect are two different things. This is merely bravado from Sony to they can later feign surprise and makes a big deal out of it, knowing full well that were the roles reversed that they would do the same.

  • Tonight on Hypocrisy News at a 11.

  • Sony said Thursday that it expected Microsoft to ensure that games from Activision Blizzard are available on non-Microsoft video game platforms ...

    Bwahahahaaa!!

    Oh I'm sure Microsoft will do just that {nudge, nudge, wink, wink}

    Right now games are the main thing keeping Windows from losing serious amounts of market share. I've talked to so many people who complain about Windows and when I tell them about GNU Linux/BSD/Apple they always say "If my games worked on (OS being discussed), I would drop Windows so fast."

    Hells, the only reason I keep a Windows system around is for my favorite game, which ironically works great with WINE or Steam's Proton but m

    • I think that Microsoft is really starting to focus a lot more on the PC as a good gaming experience. The new IO layer they added in Windows 11 is part of that and upgrades they are making to gamepass. I think that is a big chunk of how they intend to keep marketshare and you are completely correct about that.

  • ... delivery of a pony any moment now.

  • Dunno if you guys remember, but Microsoft allegedly used to have bugs in their product to, some say, deliberately cripple software they felt compete with them. Example: there used to a spreadsheet software called Lotus 1-2-3 and also a word processor called WordPerfect. Those were the industry leaders in the late 80s and 1990s. However mysteriously in the 1990s they used to encounter crashes and other issues in Windows. Oh and they same thing would happen with the web browser Netscape. It never worked prope

  • "Sony said Thursday that it expected Microsoft to ensure that games from Activision Blizzard are available on non-Microsoft videogame platforms"
    Have Sony lost their minds? Nothing new will be released for non Microsoft platforms. (After the first year or so, where thy are stuck with existing cotracts.)

  • you ask Square Enix to make a game platform-lock to PSX/PS2/PS3/PS4/PS5... you should ask them to make them available to others too...

  • I totally understand Sony's position. Since Bloodborne, Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone, Gods of War, The Last of Us, and Ghosts of Tsushima are all coming to Xbox when exactly? I mean it's only fair right since Sony has such a great history of making sure all their games are available on all platforms. The strides Sony has taken in open cross platform multiplayer also shows how open and egalitarian they are.

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