Why Sony says it can’t trust Microsoft’s Call of Duty offer? Answer: Bethesda
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
To my knowledge Microsoft never made any commitment saying that Bethesda games would always come out on other platforms.
I also still think that Sony is being incredibly hypocritical here with how they are responding considering their love of making exclusive contracts. Final Fantasy being a big example right now but it seems to be a trend that Square and Sony will continue.
It remains to be seen how Sony will actually handle Bungie.
Ultimately the way I see it, is the Activision deal actually a good thing? I don't know, it is a lot of studios going under Microsoft. But on the flip side Sony has a very nasty tendency of getting cocky in gaming and making some very anti consumer decisions. Ex: The price of the PS3, backwards compatibility, cross play multiplayer, and others.
The simple fact is we need competition in the console marketplace, without it I doubt we would have ever gotten any playstation games on PC, which they still seem reluctant to support at all.
Every game that has exclusive content on Playstation
Not because I don't have a PS5, I do. But I refuse to support those types of business decisions. Particularly when there is exclusive content.
Edit: Fixing FF15 to FF16
The FF7 remake came out in 2020 and is still not on xbox and there is no indication it will. Now that did come out on PC though.
Deathloop came out on Xbox but it is unclear if that would have happened had Xbox not bought Bethesda or if Sony would have tried to keep it exclusive.
The annoying part is that we just simply don't know what that situation actually looks like.
https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-sony-blocking-final-fanta...
(you're right though, the sacrifices required for an N64 port would ruin the game)
Probably not a big problem for Sony, but as someone who bought the game I am kind of pissed about that.
But I totally agree with you about Sony being hypocritical.
The only reason this particular case is weird is because its a Microsoft account on Playstation.
Not saying it's a good practice, but I don't know if in that case I would solely attack Microsoft.
But either ways, it's not relevant to this situation. We are talking of game.being made available. Not about whether it has login to the parent company or not.
Let's not forget that Sony was the last to allow cross platform multiplayer on Minecraft.
Microsoft accounts ask for a lot of personal information that they simply don't need, and I feared that opting not to provide that personal information would likely put my account at risk for being capriciously banned by bureaucratic anti-botting systems in the future. Furthermore, should I ever need a Microsoft account for some more important reason, I would not want that connected to an account I game online with. Mixing work and play is a bad idea, and having two separate accounts seems like a likely setup for a capricious ban sometime in the future. So yeah, I once bought this game from Notch and had a legit account for it, but now I have to pirate it because Microsoft decided to get invasive and nosy.
The biggest problem in the video games industry is that all companies that have any kind of control abuse anti-consumer practices to keep their profits up. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are all terrible in their own unique ways.
On PC there are some nice(r) players, but PC gaming is neither affordable nor accessible to people who are fine with their Chromebooks already and just want to play video games once in a while. Right now your choices are often "overpay for a prebuilt computer at your local store" or "find out what a PCIe lane is supposed to be and what the 5 in DDR5 even stands for". If you're not turning on your computer every day, you're definitely getting interrupted with updates from software you don't recognize, and that assumes you managed to set up the right driver (hint: not the one that auto-installed!) for your PC.
I hope Valve's efforts take off, not just in the handheld space. The new Steam Big Picture works quite well and the Steam Deck rarely feels any different from a console. At the same time Linux game compatibility has changed drastically since the days of the Steam Box programme. This would open up the gaming market to new players and make PC gaming much easier to get into.
However I would not include PC and especially not Switch in this conversation. Since often what you hear is something like "I have a Switch and ..." and then your platform of choice. Some of that is price, the games Nintendo has, but ultimately Nintendo just doesn't compete in the same space. They don't have to.
On the PC front (which you mention just adding some more context) I think many of us here need to be careful about actual expectations of the PC gaming market. Not only is it expensive but you need the space and in some cases the technical experience to deal with issues that come up.
For a lot of people a console is a good option given you can buy the hardware and you will be able to run any new games for around 10 years, maybe even longer given how this generation transition is going. You can mostly just assume your game will work and won't have compatibility issues. You also likely already have a TV you can connect it too.
That isn't to say that the PC market is small, not by any means. But there is a very real reason that consoles are a good option for many people.
My point with mentioning that is more, it really is just Playstation vs Xbox for this conversation. PC is important but it's it isn't going to stop a console maker from making anti consumer decisions. I agree that all of the companies engage in bad practices, I just don't want an unchecked company. Just like I don't want Playstation to go out of business either.
Maybe Steam could make a dent in that, but so far any of their attempts seem more complimentary to your existing setup vs a replacement. I know some people say they game solely on a steam deck but I don't fully get that.
For starters, I can respond to this line: I haven't gamed on a Microsoft product since I switched to Valve's Proton. That's a good thing, and Valve putting that leverage there really opens the door for other manufacturers. Better yet, it kicks both Microsoft and Sony in the pants and asks them to come up with a better reason to exist than "API exclusivity". That's badass, in my book.
As for Sony, I don't think it's hard to see that they're struggling here. The end of the PS4's lifecycle was a bit of a mess, and resulted in Sony changing their attitude for a lot of things like crossplay and publishing to PC. The featureset for the PS5 is almost comically gimmecky, the games cost too much, and without backwards-compatibility the game library would be almost empty. It distinctly feels like Sony's strategy of using exclusives to bolster cross-platform releases isn't working anymore.
My point here isn't to bash Sony, but to highlight that they have professional agency and have repeatedly made poor choices in software and hardware. It's fine if you want to zoom-in on the decidedly small arena of "Sony vs Microsoft", but it's hard to look at their fight and say that it's not Sony's fault.
I do think the Switch is a competitor to the bigger players, though, but only for certain games. There's a huge market out there that just wants to play some fun, casual games, and doesn't care about the latest Call of Duty. This market is the reason the mobile gaming industry is worth hundreds of billions and why Nintendo remains a success. The Switch placates the needs for many people that would've otherwise bought an Xbox or Playstation: it's better suited for gaming than a mobile phone and less expensive and "gamer" than the alternatives. It being handheld also puts it in a unique position that Microsoft and Sony are trying to compete against with their mobile game streaming services.
To me, Animal Crossing and Pokemon are not that dissimilar to Final Fantasy and Call of Duty. These games could be ported to the higher spec'd competitors but they remain exclusive. It's interesting how "I've got a Switch and an Xbox" has become relatively normal but "I've got an Xbox and a Playstation" hasn't. Nintendo has done really well convincing its customers that their funky tablet somehow lives in a category of its own.
I've also seriously considered setting my PC up for a SteamOS dual boot, but sadly Nvidia being Nvidia makes that difficult to do.
There are some glitches here and there, but SteamOS could easily be mistaken for a console system rather than a Linux distro.
At the end of the day this is literally all that is needed to get this merger approved. Sony has exclusivity for one of the top MMOs and Microsoft wants a competing offering in World of Warcraft.
It’s so beyond hypocritical for Sony to be taking this stance and I hope they are eventually laughed out of court.
To MS’ credit, they were fast (~10 minutes) processing my refund for the Mac edition, and they saved me $30 because the iPhone Bedrock is $10 and works perfectly at full frames with minimal input lag when mirrored to my Macbook Air M1.
I use my Switch pro controller which “just works” when paired to my phone while my nephew plays on his Switch. I have an iPhone SE 2nd gen.
/edit we have to play on a realm because P2P cross-platform multiplayer is hilariously broken on Switch and MS timeline for fixing it seems to be “hmmm never”
Java is the better way to play Minecraft generally, which is unfortunate because the performance is still really bad.
Weirdly, despite issues and delays getting the latest versions to work, I'd argue this is the best way to enjoy minecraft. Very smooth low CPU load compared to Win10 or Java, and works well with keyboard and mouse.
First off, while the two games are roughly 95% the same, they are entirely different codebases (Java & C++), with their own bugs, quirks, incompatible formats, protocols, a couple unique mechanics, etc.
Java Edition (the OG Minecraft) has too huge of a following; it was heavily reverse-engineered early on, with a couple independent efforts (Fabric, Forge) creating modding bridges that enabled a thriving community of mod makers, that many servers heavily rely on. Even if you only consider the creator communities on YouTube (like Hermitcraft, Empires SMP, SciCraft) - some creators from these communities have millions of subscribers. You can't neglect Java edition because you will alienate an enormous part of your community and basically kill the brand. In fact Mojang's strategy is usually to release new features in JE development snapshots, and trickle them to Bedrock Edition once a stable JE release is cut.
But JE is also some of the most poorly-optimised software in existence, even after you install third-party mods (Sodium, Iris) that fix a lot of the performance issues. To even have a remote chance at supporting all the underpowered platforms, Bedrock Edition (formerly Pocket Edition) had to be created. Mojang/Microsoft is in one hell of a pickle, maintaining two parallel implementations of their core product, bending over their backs to maintain feature parity, with no real hope for cross-play ever.
Now why is there no Bedrock for Mac & Linux, is indeed a very good question. Perhaps it has less to do with being evil and more to do with the fact that these are likely already niche, as a total slice of JE installations, and Microsoft doesn't see a market there. Personally I am not bothered, as I prefer Java Edition anyway, but I understand why someone could get upset over it.
Funny thing is, thanks to Minecraft JE being Java, it works quite well even on completely unsupported platforms. The community built custom cross-platform launchers, figured out pretty quickly how to run the game natively on M1 Macs, heck it runs perfectly fine under *BSDs as well.
Java Edition works really well even on my A12 iPad Pro using Jitterbug!
Of course it would be nice if Microsoft/Mojang bridged the gap themselves instead of leaving it to the community, but that'll never happen.
> "But what's interesting in this question isn't what's technically possible through enough ingenuity from the community, but what's officially supported."
I confess I'm not sure what "interesting" means in this context. What is officially supported matters much less to me than what is possible and practical. I think generally, experienced gamers are comfortable installing mods and are better served by whichever engine has better modding support (be it official or unofficial.)
The way Microsoft is treating Minecraft with respect to Linux and macOS would be an example of what Sony is afraid of, which goes against my parent comment's claim that the article "ignore[s] Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but other platforms also get any of the spinoffs"; I claim that Minecraft is a perfect example of the kind of thing Sony should be afraid of.
Trying to understand Sony through such a lens is folly, see: the inexplicable limitations on Fallout/Skyrim modding. "less technical people" with Xboxes enjoy modding Fallout and Skyrim, but Sony chose to severely limit that on their platform and the reasons they gave never made any rational business sense.
Sony is best understood as an irrational animal with a history of biting people without apparent provocation. Sony leadership does not understand many if not most of the businesses Sony is involved in, so they self-sabotage often.
I used to, but anything not Apple is usually met with mockery, disdain, or a combination of the two.
Aren't those technical tradeoffs with backwards compatibility either limiting technical choices to change architecture or increasing price by adding additional hardware to remain compatible?
But then they switched to software compatibility, which on its own is not a bad decision. But the issue was they removed the software backwards compatibility from later PS3 hardware without a good explanation.
I think there is a very good reason that the ps4 was not backwards compatible with ps3 games, the architecture was very different. But at the same time they are pushing playstation now as a way to play those older games, and it appeared anti consumer. Why could you not just put in the game and it would start streaming it.
On the flip side we had Xbox. Which a couple years after the launch of the Xbox one started their backwards compatibility initiative. Which allowed you to put in the disk for an older game and it would download a version of the game that would work on your new hardware. Now this was not for all games, but it was ultimately a free addition.
Sony was also very wishy washy on PS5 backwards compatibility, which was very frustrating. It felt like working with ps4 games was an afterthought for them. Ultimately it turned out fine, but it caused a lot of confusion.
Previously this was more of an issue than it was today. Since consoles are basically a PC now compatibility shouldn't be much of an issue, but previously it would have been a big issue.
Later they released PS2 classics on PSN that use full software emulation. A lot of PS2 games don't seem to work well with that emulator from what we know from jailbroken PS3s. Games also needed specific tweaks to the emulator to work. Perhaps they could have done what Microsoft did with 360 and had but maybe they felt like that was too clunky?
But I thought it was fully software emulation in later hardware but it was partial? Well I guess that would at least give an explanation.
I knew it was buggy, but it always felt odd to remove it since even a buggy option would have been better than no option. But if it did still have some hardware component that would explain it.
"The Japs period, Nintendo has the same cocky attitude after success post-Wii, post-Switch"
I'm not sure if a "technically we didn't promise anything" is that good of an excuse when you tell the regulators that it wouldn't be beneficial to you to withhold games from other platforms.
Microsoft is one of the kings of anti-consumer decisions. Just recently we've had the Windows 11 TPM requirements, Windows 10 forced updates, Minecraft Bedrock Edition shenanigans, the trash fire that is Microsoft Teams, ads in Windows, telemetry in Windows, and Microsoft blackmailing me into giving them my PII by preventing me from accessing my legally purchased copy (from Mojang) of Minecraft until I did...
...and that's ignoring the stuff from the past few decades: "Secure Boot", Windows bundling with consumer devices, and Internet Explorer bundling with Windows, just off the top of my head.
Wikipedia has a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
In a perfect world, there would be no platform exclusives, especially not on consoles, unless we're talking about money-starved indie studios taking funding so they can survive as a company. The expensive consoles are all basically the same devices with some special tricks here and there. Sure, integrating games with the console OS will take some time, but most of the game isn't nearly as platform specific as these companies pretend it is.
In practice, every console brand is paying developers for exclusive rights, even just for timed exclusives. From Apple to Valve, the entire industry is riddled with companies trying to make their platform have an artificial edge above the others, because the truth is that the consumer doesn't really care what hardware the games run on; "you can't have this if you buy from our competitors" is the norm.
This causes silly things like Spiderman being a Playstation exclusive character in that Marvel game and absurd side effects on surrounding platforms (like that time you could make a Fortnite account on Playstation that only worked on Playstations despite the cross-platform nature of the game).
For the good of the consumer, I hope the merger gets cancelled, though I don't think it'll happen. Sony doesn't get to complain, though, as it has relied on these exact shady business practices for decades now.
+100 Absolutely insane that we have mostly general purpose computing devices hindered by marketing deals and not technical infeasibility.
Of God of War and Horizon, the first was from an internally founded studio, and the latter was purchased all the way back in 2005.
With their sizeable investments in Square and From Software, Microsoft is upping the ante of the game they are both playing. Sony is simply looking at potentially losing their biggest third-party moneymaker and they’re complaining. Microsoft have them dead to rights. It’s gonna get uglier.
I fully expect either Square or From to be straight up bought by Sony in retaliation.
I would have agreed with you if you were to mention Sony deals with Square Enix, but both God of War and Horizon were pretty much in house exclusives, developed by studios funded directly by Sony, like Halo was for Microsoft at some point.
Activision is a massive corporation, though, and the CoD franchise routinely earns hundreds of millions of dollars per release. The scale is nowhere comparable.
That's baloney. If someone is remotely interested in strategy games for example (MMOs, Real time strategy or Civ like complex games) they are better run on PCs because of keyboard and mouse. There is also the consumer who has the money to splurge out on a high end GPU and wants to run games at high refresh 4K. And there are old dinosaurs like me who could never get used to controllers, and I tried. Got an Xbox controller for my PC for Elden Ring, couldn't get used to it, switched back to KB/Mouse, finished game easy.
Would you reconsider if you could connect a keyboard/mouse to a PS/Xbox and play strategy games?
I’d love to have just 1 gaming box, that can do everything!
My PC does that.
I guess if good strategy games come out on XBox/PS5 and they support regularly KB/Mouse I might get a console. Then again, lack of KB/Mouse is just one of my gripes. No modding and a general purpose computer locked down to do a few things make consoles useless for me. On my PC I can do whatever I want.
GoW and Horizon became as big as they are today while being PS exclusives from day one, so them being exclusives tomorrow is business as usual. CoD has been multi-platform since day one, so becoming an Xbox/Windows exclusive would represent a very significant change.
Bethesda had a deal with Sony to keep Deathloop as a timed PlayStation exclusive. After Microsoft bought Bethesda they honored that deal and released the game excusively on the competing platform.
They never offered to release Starfield on PlayStation just like Sony never offered to release Spiderman on Xbox when they bought Insomniac.
This is an absurd angle for one comical reason:
Spiderman...is Sony property. Like Sony Entertainment Corporate. They bought the rights in the 90s. That's why Spiderman only recently joined the MCU. This is Nintendo letting Valve make a Mario game..but requiring it to be on Nintendo platforms. That all checks out.
Sony's fair complaint here is that Microsoft made public statements (without contracts) that they wouldn't do what they did and then did it anyways. Their angle is that MS will find ways around the COD problem by releasing new IP or spinoffs based on it.
Except they never did that. What Microsoft said is that they would keep existing games supported on whatever platform they are on and honour any existing contract. They have done both.
Also the paragraph after the being quoted goes.
> Elsewhere in the interview, Howard admits that the parties haven't fully discussed the details of multiplatform publishing as part of the purchase deal.
Also the quote was about the next elder scrolls but starfield.
Sony still has an incentive to sell hardware and keep games exclusive though. Unlike Microsoft, they don't control Windows and don't have an incentive to keep Windows the gaming OS of choice. Microsoft is also trying to push their own Xbox Game Pass and get users gradually away from Steam.
The only recent significant studio acquisitions I can think of already had a long history of making PS exclusives (e.g., Insomniac).
But they never cared about windows and Xbox players when the game stakes were low enough for them to play the exclusive game.
Developing new versions and new games will take as much money and probably more than the initial versions.
I doubt you or most people would consider Breath of the Wild not to be Nintendo exclusive despite it being on TWO different Nintendo platforms and playable on other platforms thanks to third parties. Microsoft plays the exclusive game too no matter how much people like to pretend that they don't control Windows and benefit from keeping it the dominate PC gaming OS.
I can't run Halo Infinite or Forza Horizon 5 on PS5 either regardless if I wanted to.
You got my hopes up:/ I just looked and I don't see a single COD game showing proton/steamdeck support on steam. Maybe there's workarounds for some of the old ones, but I don't think any recent ones with working anti cheat have anything but Windows support.
> Even if the CMA tried to enforce a so-called "behavioral remedy" to keep Call of Duty multi-platform, that move would not "address the myriad ways Microsoft could circumvent its obligations," Sony wrote. Sony also said Microsoft has a "history of non-compliance with behavioral commitments," pointing to Bethesda as well as previous broken commitments regarding Windows and Internet Explorer.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/eu-fines-microso...
So, why can't Sony trust Microsoft's Call of Duty offer? Answer: They're Microsoft.
Whichever Microsoft decision maker caused the Edge icon to be forced onto all Windows users desktops (sometimes repeatedly), sure has given Sony some high profile evidence to work with.
The only commitment they made for that deal was the keep existing games supported on the platforms they already existed and to uphold any existing agreements.
And they have uphold both of those. Elder scrolls online is getting all the same support on PlayStation as Xbox and both Ghostwire Tokyo and Deathloop released as timed PlayStation exclusives as agreed on earlier contacts.
They never made anything that would contractually bind them to do something, but they made statements that don't seem to align with their actions.
Consoles these days are nothing but glorified mid-to-low tier PCs at a good price (usually costs the company money), that end up causing PC ports to be horrible messes as well as delay improvements in the industry due to the hardware. Not to mention, they're walled gardens.
On their gaming branch they managed to repaint themselves as saint to community but the way they have been stacking major studio and distributors acquisitions is quite worrying. Once the Activision one is finished they will definitely have monopoly over several types of games (but probably not if you look at it as a whole).
The older versions will keep working for other platforms, Microsoft is investing in the development of new versions, it will take the same kind of money, and probably even more than developing any of the previous versions.
Sony started this exclusive game shitshow. They can't complain when it is lead to their ultimate logical consequences.
If MS doesn't buy Activision, that continue can move along perfectly fine and be an extremely profitable company serving two platforms. They have always done this and one could say they produce a "commodity" game. MS is trying to monopolize it and Sony doesn't trust MS that they will continue to keep it a "commodity" product. They could technically honor any commitment by creating a bad "lite" game and have a really good full game only on Xbox for example.
Sony pretty much developed their own IP to make it part of the PS package. They needed more reason for people to buy so they invested heavily and took risks making exclusive games. Some of them panned out and some didn't, but the ones that did help sell the PS. Why should they sell that to XBox? It's considered a feature of the PS.
It's like saying since Tesla didn't sell their battery to other EV manufacturers (making it exclusive to Tesla), Toyota should be allowed to buy the largest drivetrain manufacturer in the world because they started this whole exclusive shitshow.
We actually don't know this. It's not a guarantee that an extremely profitable company doesn't want to exit the market and will exist "as is" in perpetuity. The fact that they've put themselves into a position to be bought out is its own strong signal they are considering exit strategies.
Activision's own history is full of being the bucket other huge publishers (messily) exited into. (Vivendi, being a huge example, and itself carrying the combined exited weight of Sierra, Davidson, and Knowledge Associates. Blizzard being another strange example.)
Companies generally have very strong "will to live" certainly, but boards get tired and investors get cranky, and sometimes companies "need" to make an exit.
It's possible Activision remains a large publisher if the Microsoft buy out fails. It is also just as possible that vultures see what is left of Activision as a dead man walking and start to pick at it immediately and strip mine it for parts. (Atari, Infogrames, THQ, …) It is also just as possible that Activision will be between a rock and a hard place and forced to take the next best offered deal. (Would you be just as upset if Activision became Sony exclusive? Or if Activision became just another branch of EA?)
The alternatives right now include a lot more than just the binary of "Microsoft buys Activision" and "Activision remains in its current state", especially because "Activision tries to sell to Microsoft" is a strong signal that the current state either isn't sustainable or isn't as strongly as interest to the board/investors as people might think.
"Activision continues to exist as-is" is a bad reason to block the purchase. Activision may not survive either way. ("Activision may not survive either way" of course isn't a good reason to be pro-buyout, of course, either. I'd think that goes without saying, but sometimes here on HN the obvious needs to also be reminded in conversations full of polarized opinions. I'm not explicitly pro- or anti-buyout here, I'm just reminding everyone that companies sometimes die and there's no "natural state" here to argue about.)
(I don't have much to add to the speculation about exclusives and will they/won't they Microsoft keeping their bargain on cross-platform initiatives. I think that debate is going to keep going in circles.)
This is 100% not true. Companies don't have to put themselves in a position to be bought to have offers thrown at them. There are literally 100s of examples of this. Every company can be bought for a price. That's primarily the mismatch. This is the reason Instagram and Whatsapp sold for the prices they did at the time they did. When they were bought, everyone was shocked at the obscene sum of money for such a small team. In hindsight amazing purchase, but at that time Zuck had to throw an obscene sum at them to get them to say yes.
Also public companies have a fiduciary duty consider *all* offers and see if its valuable for shareholders. At a certain price, it will become a, no brainer, extremely valuable offer. The only other hurdle is getting the ok from regulators which is where they are stuck now.
The rest of your response hinges of the fact that we don't know the unknown variables and therefore the decision is not simple. But this argument could be made for literally every decision in life and we would all be stuck doing nothing. We have to make decisions based on what we know and accept that there will be a margin of error. Ideally we also know all the risk factors but that's literally impossible.
We're past the stage where offers have been thrown at them. We're at the stage where wedding vows have started to be exchanged "pending regulatory approval". Companies do have to put a lot of work into those parts of the M&A stages (they've done multiple rounds of fit vetting and offer/contract approvals and investor handshakes, etc). At the waiting for regulatory approval stage they've already gone above and beyond any "fiduciary duty" they are expected to perform to already seeing the M&A as the "foregone conclusion". They've agreed to be bought and have put tons of work into being bought. A lot of companies don't come back from that when the regulatory agencies disapprove and shut the whole thing down. At the very least it is a morale blow for all the of the hard work of the M&A process up to that point and boards/investors often seem to become more certain that the next step is an exit, especially after the pain of a failed exit.
> The rest of your response hinges of the fact that we don't know the unknown variables and therefore the decision is not simple. But this argument could be made for literally every decision in life and we would all be stuck doing nothing. We have to make decisions based on what we know and accept that there will be a margin of error. Ideally we also know all the risk factors but that's literally impossible.
We aren't making any decisions here. Other than I guess picking sides in "anti-buyout" and "pro-buyout". I admitted I'm not feeling like my opinions weight to either side, I'm just pointing out the possible real world fallout of "anti-buyout". That's nothing to do with decisions at all. I am just pointing out all the unknowns because people are assuming that supporting "anti-buyout" means supporting the status quo and that's absolutely not the same thing.