Microsoft Digs Up Dirt - Sony Blocks Release of Several Xbox Games
From Microsoft's latest report, we learn that Sony was set to block the release of several major Xbox titles. Among them are Final Fantasy VII Remake and Silent Hill 2 Remake.
Announced earlier this year Microsoft's desire to acquire Activision Blizzard obliged Sony to oppose the deal, which, the Japanese believe, will harm competitiveness in the gaming market. Since then, the battle between the industry bigshots has taken on - let's not hide it - a nasty character. A perfect example of this is the latest report on the so-called Xbox exclusion agreement.
Microsoft published a response to the statement of the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on the Activision Blizzard acquisition. The document describes, hardly fair, a move on the part of the PlayStation manufacturer. According to the Americans, Sony was supposed to convince some developers to omit the Xbox from the list of target platforms for their upcoming games.
"Exclusivity strategies are not uncommon in the games industry and other market participants have access to their own content.238 Both Sony’s and Nintendo’s exclusive first-party games rank among the best-selling in Europe and worldwide.239 Current Sony exclusive content includes prominent first-party titles such as The Last of Us, Ghosts of Tsushima, God of War, and Spiderman. In addition to having outright exclusive content, Sony has also entered into arrangements with third-party publishers which require the “exclusion” of Xbox from the set of platforms these publishers can distribute their games on. Some prominent examples of these agreements include Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix), Bloodborne (From Software), the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI (Square Enix) and the recently announced Silent Hill 2 remastered (Bloober team)" reads the report (via Xbox News for Koreans).
In short, this means that it would depend on Sony's goodwill whether games such as the aforementioned Final Fantasy VII Remake or Silent Hill 2 Remake made their way to Xbox consoles.
While the presence of the above titles (owned by third-party publishers) is not surprising, the mention of Bloodborne in Microsoft's report is incomprehensible. After all, the game was fully financed by Sony, which is the exclusive owner of the brand.
At the time of writing this news, Sony representatives have not issued any statement on the matter.
