Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is out soon and looking very good, with a ton of hype surrounding the PS5 exclusive open-world superhero game. But now, even years after Sony made clear it would be giving Spidey a new look, fans keep grumbling about the loss of Peter Parker’s old face, last seen in the original PlayStation 4 version of the first Spider-Man game. And Peter Parker actor Yuri Lowenthal has a message to those fans: Get over it.
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WhenMarvel’s Spider-Man, originally released on PS4 in 2018, made its leap to the next-gen PS5 in 2020, it came with a bunch of changes and graphical improvements. One of the changes that got the most headlines didn’t involve ray-traced reflections or 4K textures. Instead, a lot of people got very upset that developer Insomniac Games decided to change the face of Peter Parker, making the character look younger and more like Tom Holland in the process. Since then fans have been talking about it a lot. And Lowenthal is “tired of talking about it after all this time” and just wants fans to move on.
In an interview with ComicBook.com published Thursday, Lowenthal said that he got over the change as soon as Insomniac explained to him it would help improve Parker’s facial animation, telling the studio “I’m all in” after learning about why the change was being made.
PlayStation / Insomniac Games
“The performance was the same for me,” said Lowenthal. “I don’t care if he looks like a goblin, if my performance is better, then I’m in. I’m kind of tired of talking about it, to be honest, because I think everything that needs to be said has been said.”
The Spider-Man actor acknowledged that it will take longer for some fans and players to get comfortable with the face swap. And he also admitted that he understands some people will likely “never” reach that point. However, he does see one positive to all the backlash and continued demands for the original face to return.
“People connected emotionally so hard and so deeply in the first game that they’re mad when they feel that person changes,” said Lowenthal. “I can only be so mad about that because it worked—not the [face change]—but you connected with the character which is great.”
But the actor did have a final message for those still struggling with the new face of Peter Parker: “Now, get over it!”
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches on PS5 on October 20.
You probably saw a ton of headlines about Xbox leaks this week: new hardware, upcoming games, Game Pass costs, acquisition strategies. A trove of unredacted documents accidentally uploaded to a federal court’s case server gave the world an unprecedented look into the secret machinations of the gaming wing of a $2 trillion tech giant. But if you check out just one leak from this historic week for Xbox it should be Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer’s analysis of what’s currently plaguing triple-A video game publishers.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
His analysis was in an email exchange from March 2020, in the midst of the Xbox team planning ahead of a feedback meeting with Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two. “In terms of subscriptions and the impact on larger publishers I realized that I haven’t really done a good job sharing our view on the disruption AAA publishers potentially see and how their role in the industry will likely change with the growth in subscription platforms like Xbox Game Pass,” Spencer wrote (the memo was directed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, CFO Amy Hood, then-executive business VP Peggy Johnson, and head of marketing Chris Capossela).
The head of Xbox, who first joined Microsoft as an intern back in 1988 and has been working on the gaming side of its business for over 20 years now, proceeded to diagnose the current state of big publishers as they face wave after wave of market disruption. It was a cogent, incisive commentary on the fears driving an ever-shrinking class of mega gaming companies that are clinging harder and harder to the few big-budget franchises they have that still pay out.
Spencer lays out how publishers once existed to leverage scale in negotiations with retailers for shelf space. Then everything changed. “The creation of digital storefronts like Steam, Xbox Store and PlayStation Store eventually democratized access for creators breaking physical retail’s lock on game distribution,” he writes. “Publishers were slow to react to this disruption. The AAA publishers did not find a way to leverage the moat that physical retail created in the digital realm in a way that had them continue their dominance of the game marketplace.”
Companies like Activision, Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft eventually made their own middle-man clients to try and get around platform fees, and a few later followed up with their own subscription services. None of them were built early enough or offered a compelling enough alternative to get big. Players complained about bad UI and bad deals. Franchises like Call of Duty and Madden that had once abandoned Steam returned. Game Pass got big while EA Play and Ubisoft+ stayed small. The only competitive advantage publishers have left is being able to pour more money than anyone else into annualized blockbusters.
Spencer writes,
Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf. These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP. The hurdle rate on new IP at these high production levels have led to risk aversion by big publishers on new IP. You’ve seen a rise of AAA publishers using rented IP to try to offset the risk (Star Wars with EA, Spiderman with Sony, Avatar with Ubisoft etc). This same dynamic has obviously played out in Hollywood as well with Netflix creating more new IP than any of the movie studios.
Specifically, the AAA game publishers, starting from a position of strength driven from physical retail have failed to create any real platform effect for themselves. They effectively continue to build their scale through aggregated per game P&Ls hoping to maximize each new release of their existing IP.
In the new world where a AAA publisher don’t have real distribution leverage with consumers, they don’t have production efficiencies and their new IP hit rate is not disproportionately higher than the industry average we see that the top franchises today were mostly not created by AAA game publishers. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Candy Crush, Clash Royale, DOTA2 etc. were all created by independent studios with full access to distribution. Overall this, imo, is a good thing for the industry but does put AAA publishers, in a precarious spot moving forward. AAA publishers are milking their top franchises but struggling to refill their portfolio of hit franchises, most AAA publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago.
Microsoft’s answer to this is Game Pass, not out of the goodness of its heart but because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors. “Our goal is to find a way to both grow our subscription (which is our new platform) and help the AAA publishers build towards a successful future,” Spencer writes. “For publishers with 2-3 scale franchises that’s a difficult transition. Again, taking a clue from Hollywood, it’s not clear how a standalone subscale media publisher grows is this world without adapting to new paradigms or getting consolidated but we believe we can help a Take2 by increasing monetizable [total addressable market] across more endpoints inside of a global platform like Xbox Game Pass (inclusive of xCloud).”
The suggestion here is that the type of game that can thrive on a subscription service is either a small one that benefits from better curation and visibility or a live-service one that can make up revenue on the backend by charging all the new players microtransactions (the new store shelves are inside the games themselves). That’s also a pretty grim assessment, and probably part of the reason Sony has repeatedly said that bringing its big first-party exclusive games like Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us to its competing PS Plus service day-and-date would cripple the economics of blockbuster production.
Spencer’s email was written over three years ago at this point, and was aimed largely at trying to summarize the current state of the industry for his bosses. We can see how things have played out since, though. Take-Two, Ubisoft, and Electronic Arts have decided to collaborate with Game Pass, and EA Play is now part of the service. Microsoft, meanwhile, gobbled up ZeniMax (including Bethesda Game Studios), and is now on the cusp of doing the same with subscription holdouts Activision Blizzard. All while smaller competitors like Embracer go into a tailspin.
It’s not clear who the big publisher model was serving after physical games died, outside of the richly compensated CEOs and occasional shareholder buybacks. But it’s also not yet clear that whatever replaces them will serve anyone—developers, players, fans—any better.
You can see the email exchange in its entirety below:
This week brought us a wonderful treasure trove of leaks from deep inside the highest echelons of Microsoft’s Xbox division, accidentally shared online as a result of the company’s legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission over its now-greenlit Activision acquisition. These confidential emails, slides, and images of potential new products from the Xbox manufacturer reveal the inner workings of Microsoft’s gaming division, as well as whispers of some possible new games from Bethesda.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
The leaks happened courtesy of Microsoft itself, as it provided these sensitive documents to the court via a publicly accessible link. Yesterday Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer reacted to the leaks, saying that it “was hard to see our team’s work shared in this way.”
“At some point,” Spencer wrote, “getting Nintendo would be a career moment.” He speculated that the Japanese games giant could become more open to acquisition offers in the future due to changing pressures on its board of directors. “It’s just taking a long time for Nintendo to realize that their future exists off of their own hardware,” he wrote. “A long time… 🙂
The emails also reveal that Microsoft thought about purchasing Valve and Warner Bros. Games.
Bethesda might be working on an Oblivion remaster
Because I decided to flip my Xbox 360 from vertical to horizontal while it was running Oblivion, my adventuring in Tamriel was cut short via a huge circular scratch on the disc that no amount of toothpaste could remedy. Maybe I’ll get another chance; while it’s still up in the air, the 2006 Elder Scrolls adventure might get a fancy new remaster in which I could make up for those lost years.
Bethesda’s roadmap was among the many recently released Xbox documents. It includes a sequel to Ghostwire: Tokyo, a Dishonored 3, and remasters of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Also, don’t expect The Elder Scrolls VI for quite a while.
Spencer: AAA game publishers lost their mojo
Phil Spencer stated that “AAA publishers were slow to react to [the disruption]” of digital storefronts like Steam and the shops built into Xbox and PlayStation.
In a leaked email, Spencer wrote that third-party publishers were unable to replicate the “dominance” they established back in the days of video game retail. After losing their advantage of highly exclusive access to consumers in brick and mortar stores, they “have not found a way to effectively cross promote, they have not found a way to build publisher brands that drive consumer affinity (the way Disney has in video).”
He noted that instead they’ve adopted a strategy of making huge bets on highly expensive prestige projects, relying on those risky, all-in bets to establish and maintain publisher brands. He concluded that “the role of a AAA publisher has changed and become less important in today’s gaming industry.”
Microsoft expected a Red Dead Redemption 2 next-gen refresh
The Xbox Series X and Series S consoles hit the market in 2020. Since then, the lower-powered, disc-less Series S actually makes up the majority of units sold. As of April 2022, 74.8 percent of Xbox Series owners were gaming on a Series S, suggesting just a quarter of the base left gaming on the more-powerful Xbox Series X unit.
Microsoft dramatically underestimated Baldur’s Gate 3
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a super good time. But Microsoft didn’t seem to think the D&D RPG would amount to much. In leaked comments, Microsoft estimated a $5 million expense to get the game on Game Pass, justifying the low monetary amount by describing Baldur’s Gate 3 as a “second-run Stadia PC RPG.”
Reacting to this statement, Larian’s director of publishing noted that Microsoft was far from alone in underestimating the appeal of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Phil Spencer wasn’t impressed by PS5 reveal
In an email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Phil Spencer described the Xbox Series X/S line as a “better product than [what] Sony has, not just on hardware but equally important on the software platform and services.” He continued, “we have the ingredients of a winning plan […] today was a good day for us.”
Microsoft accidentally got an ‘exclusive’ Sega game
As the next-gen consoles launched in 2020 fans of Sega’s long-running Yakuza series were surprised that its latest entry, the RPG Like a Dragon, was available on Xbox Series X/S but not PlayStation 5. The Yakuza series had long been associated with PlayStation; what was up?
Yesterday’s leak revealed that Microsoft was just as surprised, and it turns out the reason for Like a Dragon landing on Xbox first was due to two competing regional exclusivity agreements Sega made essentially short-circuited each other. The result? Xbox players ate well while PlayStation fans wept into their DualSenses.
The Xbox Series X might go all-digital in 2024
We didn’t just get scans of emails from very serious people, we also got some images and details of possible forthcoming hardware, including a cylindrical-shaped Xbox Series X that won’t include a disc drive.
Code named “Brooklin,” the leaked data indicates that the possible hardware refresh will include “more internal storage, faster Wi-Fi, reduced power” and a “more immersive controller.”
The potential 2024 hardware refresh might also see a new Xbox gamepad hit the market. The image of a controller codenamed “Sebile” shows a two-tone color design and promises modular thumbsticks and features that many a PlayStation fan have known for a few years now: “lift to wake,” “precision haptic feedback,” and an accelerometer.
Despite how the controller may look in this image, the copy indicates that it will feature the “same ergonomics” as the current Xbox Series X/S controller (codenamed “Merlin”).
Microsoft sees its next Xbox as a cloud ‘hybrid’ machine
Slides projecting the future of the Xbox platform indicate that Microsoft is very much looking to the cloud (where have I heard that before?) to help power its post Xbox Series X/S console, for which it’s looking at a 2028 release.
Microsoft describes such a machine as a “next-generation hybrid game platform capable of leveraging the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences.” Cool?
So while we might get some sequels to beloved games like Dishonored and a fancy new controller for Xbox and PC, the leaked Microsoft materials also portend another nail in the coffin for physical game media . But hey, maybe Mario and Master Chief will get to go on a little adventure together at some point.
Today Sony held another State of Play event, showing off upcoming titles for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. Today’s event featured expansions for Resident Evil 4 and Tales of Arise, another look at a very funny walking simulator, and one epic, mega huge trailer for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which will launch on two (count ‘em) discs on February 29 of next year.
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Let’s get into it.
Baby Steps
Devolver Digital / GameSpot Trailers
You know, sometimes you just wake up in a mud puddle in the forest and need to figure out how to walk. Well if you’re lucky or something and haven’t experienced that in reality, then Baby Steps looks like a solid simulation of such an experience. Try to walk, fall down, talk to yourself, rinse and repeat.
Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord
Sony Pictures Virtual Reality / PlayStation
PS VR2 will be seeing some cooperative ghost-capturing action soon with Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord.
Resident Evil 4 Remake VR mode
Capcom / PlayStation
Ready to play Resident Evil 4 yet again? PS VR2 will soon be home to a VR mode for Resident Evil 4, featuring the reimagined gory violence of this classic, undying entry in the legendary horror series.
Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways
Capcom
Starring Ada Wong, Resident Evil 4 will see an expansion by way of Separate Ways, which will tell a parallel story to the main events of RE4. It releases on September 21, 2023.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
Ubisoft / PlayStation
James Cameron’s brightly colored fantasy world is coming to the land of video games by way of a first-person adventure adaptation (though you’ll get to ride some flying creatures in third-person, it seems). Like in the movies, those pesky humans are out to destroy the serene and lush environments of Pandora. It’s up to you to stop ‘em.
Ghostrunner 2
One More Level / IGN
Ghostrunner 2 will be arriving on PS5 on October 26. You can download a free demo of this fast-paced run-and-slash game today.
Deep Earth Collection PS5 plates and controller colors
PlayStation
If you’ve been looking for some new colors for your PS5, there are some on the way with Volcanic Red, Cobalt Blue, and Sterling Silver.
Helldivers II
Arrowhead Game Studios / IGN
In a close look at Helldivers II gameplay, today’s State of Play showed off the cooperative nature of this third-person shooter. With four players taking on some beastly lookin’ aliens, this looks like a pretty good excuse to round up some friends to devastate some alien wildlife.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Insomniac / PlayStation
Today we got a closer look at the open-world environment of Spider-Man2. Not only will you have Manhattan Island, but also Brooklyn, and Queens—also known as the best borough.
Tales of Arise: Beyond the Dawn
Bandai Namco / PlayStation
Tales of Arise will see a new DLC expansion hit PS5 on November 9, 2023.
Honkai Star Rail
miHoYo / PlayStation
Featuring eye-pleasing combat and some slick anime style, Honkai Star Rail launches for PS5 on October 11, 2023.
Foamstars
Square Enix / PlayStation
This Splatoon-like trades ink for foam and features specific characters similar to that of a hero shooter. The open beta launches in late September.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Square Enix / PlaySttaion
Anticipation is at a fever pitch for the continuation of Final Fantasy VII’s remake project. Today’s trailer showed off some classic environments and scenarios from the original game, as well as some wildly unexpected twists (what’s with Zack carrying Cloud into Midgar?). We also saw some vehicular travel including an, uh, Segway? There’s a ton of stuff packed into this trailer, so you can bet we’ll be watching it several times over. And then some more.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launches on February 29, 2024.
And that was it for today’s brief but very cool State of Play event. Now, I’m gonna go daydream some more about Final Fantasy VII.
Ubisoft’s upcoming Call of Duty-like first-person online shooter, XDefiant, doesn’t have a release date yet, and now we know why. According to Ubisoft, the free-to-play arena FPS failed an important first-party certification test in August, delaying the entire launch process.
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First announced in 2021 as Tom Clancy’s XDefiant, it mixes various Ubisoft franchises like Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs, and Far Cry into a single, shared-universe online shooter. Earlier this year, I played a few hours of the game’s beta and walked away excited to play more thanks to fast, responsive combat that felt similar to the gunplay found in the Xbox 360 era of Call of Duty. However, after that test, XDefiant failed an important regulatory step in the process of bringing a game to consoles, and now Ubisoft can’t say when players will get a chance to play the online FPS.
On September 11, Ubisoft’s Executive Game Director Mark Rubin announced the failed test in a surprisingly open and transparent blog post. As explained by Rubin, games aren’t just released onto consoles and platforms without any checks. Companies like Sony and Microsoft test every game released for their machines to make sure they function properly and don’t break anything. To be clear, these certification and compliance checks aren’t looking at how well a game performs or if it has buggy cutscenes or audio. It’s just meant to make sure the game follows the platform’s rules, doesn’t brick your machine, and works with each vendor’s various built-in features, like friend lists and trophies.
According to Rubin, Ubisoft began the certification process at the end of July and got its first results back in August. XDefiant didn’t pass.
Ubisoft
“We realized then that we had more work related to compliance than we had anticipated,” said Rubin. “If it had passed, then we would have been able to ship at the end of [August]. But it didn’t and so we have spent the last 3-4 weeks fixing those issues and getting ready to do another submission.”
Rubin says the game is currently in the part of the process that involves the devs finalizing their submission build and expects it to be sent back for certification “in a little less than two weeks.” If that build passes certification with no issues, then Rubin suggests XDefiant could be released in September. However, he was clear that this might not happen, and the shooter could partially fail this new round of testing and get a “conditional pass.” In that scenario, which Rubin says is likely, the game would need a day-one patch to reach final compliance with the console makers. That would take extra work and time, pushing the game’s final release date into October.
Why Ubisoft is telling fans about the failed test
So why are Ubisoft and Rubin being so open and transparent about what is often kept behind closed doors? To be clear, XDefiant isn’t some weird outlier. Plenty of games fail “cert” and have to get resubmitted, we just don’t hear about it as delays like that are built into their timeframes for release.
According to Rubin, being open like this is by design, as he and the team have avoided the “typical route” most games follow during development, citing how they have let players hop online and play the shooter long before it was finished, calling the betas “real tests” and not marketing events.
“So, when it comes to when we will release, the real answer is ‘as soon as we can,’” wrote Rubin. “And we will continue to update you with more info when we have it.”
To conclude, we set out since the concept of this game to be more transparent with our community and to listen to our players and act on their feedback. We’ve even shown that we will add features in the middle of development based on player requests. Map Voting which is in now and an S&D-like mode that is coming later are two examples of this. We want this to be your game!
In the months (nay, years) leading up to Starfield’s September 6 release, the hype for the Bethesda RPG grew and grew until it was a heretofore unseen beast, a giant Kaiju of expectation that threatened to take down Sony, upend 2023’s GOTY race, and suck up all of gamers’ precious free time.
Head of Xbox Creator Experience Sarah Bond joined in on the fun, calling Starfield “one of the most important RPGs ever made.” Bethesda head Pete Hines said it took him well over 100 hours to properly start Starfield. All of the hype whipped Xbox fans into a frenzy, and indirectly fueled the flickering flames of the console wars. Starfield’s scope, its potential, even made the then-unreleased game a talking point in the FTC trial regarding Microsoft’s purchase of Activision-Blizzard.
Then, after a few days in what Bethesda dubbed “early access,” available to deep-pocketed players who shelled out big bucks for one of several premium editions, Starfield launched. It is surprisingly not buggy, and jam-packed with side-quests that offer a steady drip of serotonin. But it’s woefully inaccessible, its UI is daunting, and it is, ultimately, just a new Bethesda game. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a stark reminder that hype trains are just marketing tools in a different font. Starfield is a good game, but it is not a groundbreaking one.
Before I got a chance to dive into Starfield, I wondered aloud (and on social media) if the game would occupy a similar space in my life that Skyrim has held on more than one occasion. Skyrim never floored me and never lingered after I powered off my console, unlike Marvel’s Spider-Man’s version of Manhattan, or story beats in Mass Effect 2. But every time I dropped back into Skyrim, I fell into the same satisfying loop, emerging from a lengthy play session a little dazed, uncertain of the time, blinking to reaccustom my eyes to the real world outside of its pixels.
Every time I jumped into Skyrim I’d go off searching for some tucked-away relic or NPC in need of help and end up climbing to the top of a peak I saw in the distance, or scurrying through caves like a little gamer Gollum, furiously lining my pockets with shiny objects. I’d “just one more side-quest” myself into the wee hours of the morning, surreptitiously pulling tokes from a pre-roll resting on the table in front of me. No matter what I did, whether it was becoming a vampire or participating in a drinking competition, I was never blown away or taken aback by what Skyrim unfurled before me—I was, however, hooked.
I’m about 20 hours into Starfield and can safely say it is exactly like Skyrim in space. The steady serotonin drip of overhearing a conversation, marking the quest associated with that conversation on my map, completing it, then going back to the list and selecting the next thing is unparalleled. It is the kind of game that completionists salivate over, the kind that I find myself longing to return to and get lost in during my workday, on the train home, while finishing off a workout.
After progressing the main campaign a bit, I violently veered into side-quest territory, spending nearly four hours straight on the Blade Runner-esque planet Neon. I joined a gang, I helped Starfield’s version of Björk recover her music, I tried to console a grief-stricken widow in the shadow of a fish corpse. I paid for VIP lounge access at a bar, helped squash a squabble over a robot that had been vandalized, and rented a room in a hotel just to say I did. Starfield has hooked me in a way that only Bethesda games can, because it is so thoroughly a Bethesda game with a shinier coat of paint.
Image: Bethesda
Expectation versus reality
There is nothing wrong with Starfield feeling familiar—Bethesda’s formula works, and has for over two decades, so I’m not crucifying Todd Howard for refusing to reinvent the wheel. I am, however, noting that there’s a clear disconnect between calling a game “one of the most important RPGs ever made” and that game then reusing long-existing RPG gameplay mechanics and storytelling techniques throughout.
As Kotaku’s Zack Zweizen points out, Starfield is “still a Bethesda RPG. You can almost feel the ancient bones of Morrowind and Fallout 3 poking through bits of the scenery and menus as you play.” Companions still linger behind NPCs chatting you up, players are still almost always overencumbered, enemies still fall over like action figures when you send a gust of gravity their way that feels almost exactly like Skyrim’s Dragon Shouts.
There’s nothing groundbreaking about Starfield, save for maybe its scope, which is possible largely because of the technological advances that have taken place within the last several years, and are now readily available in consumer-facing products like the Xbox Series X/S and modern PCs.
But as for Starfield bringing new ideas to the genre, or adding anything new to its well-worn formula…it doesn’t. Bethesda has been quietly moving its own role-playing goalposts closer to the more shallow end ever since The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, narrowing the scope of what the player can actually influence, placing you in a world that feels perfectly carved out for you to slot into, its problems cleanly laid out for you to solve. Cian Maher’s quote from an Oblivion piece for TheGamercomes to mind: “I also don’t reckon Skyrim ever managed to carve out a portion of its world and imbue [it] with the necessary narrative significance for a conclusion to not seem like deus ex machina.”
Aside from extensive ship-building mechanics, there aren’t any shiny new gameplay additions in Starfield. Building an outpost is just Fallout base-building, leveling your lockpicking or melee abilities follows similar logic to Skyrim, and there are many eerie similarities to Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds. The most noted difference comes not in an updated role-playing system or deeper NPC interactions, but in gunplay—Starfield improves upon Bethesda’s infamous combat clunkiness, and it’s welcome.
But Starfield feels the same way Fallout 4 did, which felt the same way Skyrim did, and that does not make it “one of the most important RPGs” ever made. It just makes it a good Bethesda game, a game made by a studio that Microsoft spent $7.5 billion to acquire. We’d do well to remember that, both as consumers and critics, going forward.
A new online video appears to show what looks like a PlayStation 5 Slim, the heavily rumored but not-yet-announced smaller version of Sony’s current-gen console.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
Rumors of a sleeker, slimmer PS5 have been floating around online for about a year now, but things really heated up in July. That’s when court docs from the Microsoft v. FCC hearing seemed to confirm its existence, suggesting the device would cost $400 and that it would be released later this year. Now, a new video seems to give us our first look at this slimmer PS5, while also confirming that it might have a detachable disc drive.
On August 10, as spotted by The Verge, an image of the alleged PS5 Slim leaked out via a Chinese forum. That image got shared all over X, formerly Twitter, attracting a lot of attention. But now, the recently surfaced video gives us an even better look at the (still not officially announced) console variant.
The video, posted by Better Way Electronics on Twitter, seems to confirm that not only is the PS5 slim…well, slimmer, but that it will also feature some kind of detachable disk drive. This had first been reported back in September 2022 by Insider Gaming. The new smaller PS5 also sports two USB-C ports on the front of the console, unlike the current version which only has one as well as a USB-A port.
Kotaku has contacted Sony about the leaked console.
Last year, Insider Gaming also reported that Sony was planning to release this new PS5 Slim with a detachable drive in September 2023, which lines up with what Microsoft believed in the previously mentioned court docs. Rumors suggest the PS5 Slim will be sold two ways, one console without the disc drive attached and one in a bundle that comes with it. It’s also believed that Sony will sell the drive itself separately.
At the moment, Sony is selling two versions of the PS5: The $399 PS5 Digital Edition and the $499 PS5 with a disc drive. It’s possible that this new Slim could become the only PS5 in the future, with Sony letting people buy a disc drive if they want or skipping it if they don’t care. The rumored $400 price for the Slim seems to back up that possibility.
Whether in seriousness or jest, best to just leave all vaguely unorthodox Halo opinions at the door. Halo: Combat Evolved’s campaign is an all-time classic. We shall never gaze upon the likes of Halo 3’smultiplayer community again. Do not say you loved being able to sprint in Halo 5, let alone that you thought the first Halo without Bungie was the GOAT. Master Chief himself, space hockey pads and all, would not survive the psychic damage.
At long last, Xbox owners will soon get to enjoy the MMORPG PlayStation players have enjoyed for nearly a decade. Final Fantasy XIV is headed to Xbox Series X/S in spring 2024 after being a PlayStation console exclusive since 2014.
Thank You, PS Plus, For Making My Backlog Even Bigger
Producer and director Naoki Yoshida made the announcement on stage at the game’s 2023 fanfest in Las Vegas, NV alongside Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. The Xbox Series X/S version will offer 4K graphics and faster load times, like its PlayStation 5 counterpart. While the full release is still almost a year away, an open beta will be available for players to try much sooner when patch 6.5x arrives in the months ahead.
For those who have been living under an adamantoise shell, Final Fantasy XIV has you complete fetch quests, dungeons, and raids across the dazzling world of Hydaelyn, full of political intrigue and mythical wonder. The game was one of the first live-service disasters when it first launched in 2013, and was even entirely shutdown for a time before re-releasing as A Realm Reborn.
Screenshot: Square Enix / Kotaku
It’s recieved increasingly excellent expansions ever since, each introducing new characters, classes, and conflicts. And while it’s an MMO, a Duty Support system lets you play solo with AI-controlled NPCs. By the time Final Fantasy XIV comes to Xbox Series X/S, Square Enix says the feature will enable players to complete everything from the start of the game up through its most recent Endwalker expansion without ever needing to interact with another human being.
Why did it take so long to get FFXIV on Xbox?
The story of how we got here, however, is a long one. Yoshida was asked as early as 2013 why the game wasn’t on Xbox One. His answer at the time was that Microsoft’s stance on crossplay was too restrictive. “The main reason from our side is that I don’t want the community to be divided; to be split into two or more. For example, one player might be on the PC version, another might be on the PS4 version, and I’m playing the Xbox version – but we’re not able to join the same game servers,” he told RPGSite at the time. “That is just… I just don’t like the idea. I disagree with it.”
That was back when Microsoft was the company seemingly standing in the way of crossplay between the two consoles. Years later, roles were reversed, with Sony pushing back against crossplay for games like Fortnite. Yoshida repeated his requirement for crossplay in a 2017 interview with Kotaku, and things seemed to be progressing in that direction not long after.
Spencer publicly promised to bring the game to Xbox at the X019 fanfest event in London. “We have a great relationship with Yoshida-san and we’re working through what it means to bring a cross-platform MMO, that they’ve run for years,” he told VGC at the time. “It will be one of the games that’s coming and it’s something that I know our Xbox fans will be incredibly excited to see.”
No deal immeidately materialized, however. Yoshida was asked again what the problem was during a 2021 interview around the time Final Fantasy XIV came to PS5. “So I feel bad for saying the same thing every time,” he told Easy Allies. “But we are still in discussions with Microsoft and I feel like our conversations are going in a positive tone.”
The positive tone of those conversations seemingly wasn’t enough to finally get Sony to agree to crossplay though, until now. The two companies also recently reached a 10-year agreement for Call of Duty to keep coming to PlayStation after Microsoft’s acqusition of Activision Blizzard is finalized. Purely a coincidence, I’m sure. Sony, Microsoft, and Square Enix did not immediately respond to requets for comment.
Photo: Barone Firenze / Activision / Kotaku (Shutterstock)
Microsoft and Sony have finally reached a deal for keeping Call of Duty on PlayStation once the Activision Blizzard merger goes through. The surprise agreement comes after months of fighting between the two companies and is a sign the acquisition is all but inevitable.
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“We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard,” Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer tweeted on July 16. “We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games.”
It’s not immediately clear what the terms of that agreement are, and whether they are similar to proposals Microsoft recently signed with Nintendo and other cloud gaming providers. In the past, Sony has paid Activision for special benefits relating to Call of Duty, including timed-exclusive content and special marketing rights. It was also revealed during the recent court battle over the deal that Activision had leveraged its partnership with Sony to negotiate better commission rates for the franchise on Xbox.
Sony had been vigorously contesting Microsoft’s planned acquisition of the publisher in regulatory proceedings across Europe, the UK, and the U.S. After the recent legal defeat of the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block the deal, however, the PlayStation 5 maker seems to have decided it’s time to settle. Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan had reportedly said in the past that his only interest was in blocking the deal.
Sony’s current agreement with Activision wasn’t set to expire until 2025, and the new agreement seems likely to carry through for at least the rest of the PS5’s life. Microosft has claimed all along that it’s not in its financial interest to make the series exclusive as the games generate billions in revenue on the competing platform.
Microsoft declined to comment. Sony did not immediately respond.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s defeat as it sought to block Microsoft Corp.’s acquisition of videogame maker Activision Blizzard is yet another setback for an increasingly toothless regulator that needs to pick better battles with Big Tech.
“With these 10-year contracts that Microsoft made across the board with so many vendors, Nvidia NVDA, +0.53%,
Nintendo and others, 10 years is a really long time, in my opinion,” said Sarah Hindlian-Bowler, an analyst at Macquarie Equity Research, in an interview Tuesday. “It is long enough to cover the arrival and maturity of the cloud gaming market….She understands that 10 years is a very long long time to make a guarantee of this kind.”
Hindlian-Bowler said that she had been in the minority of Wall Street analysts in not believing the U.S. government would be able to block this deal.
“The assumption that this somehow decreases the market is going to prove to be wildly incorrect,” she said, adding that she does not believe that the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority will be able to block the deal either.
The latest upset at the FTC was also not too surprising to other Capitol Hill watchers, especially in the light of other high-profile setbacks by the agency and its once-heralded commissioner, Lina Khan. When she was sworn in as chair of the FTC in mid-2021, Khan was hailed as the sheriff who would rein in Big Tech.
“It’s hard to say I am surprised by the ruling because Khan has had a fairly unsuccessful track record,” said Owen Tedford, a senior research analyst at Beacon Policy Advisors. “The regulators are pushing the boundaries, deals that previously would have gone unchallenged have now gone challenged. And they are breaking precedent because Khan and company have expressed a dislike of settlements.”
“I think that the FTC is in need of some change, in need of some refreshing and in need of doing a much better job of picking their battles,” said Hindlian-Bowler. “This does feel toothless, a lot of the fights they are picking are toothless. And unfortunately, they are missing the real battle. They are missing TikTok, they are missing the real fights where we actually have national security at risk.”
In February, one of the Republican commissioners on the FTC resigned, and wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal accusing Khan of disregarding the rule of law and due process.
Compared to the European Union, which has had far more success implementing regulation to rein in Big Tech, the U.S. is still much weaker. “The EU seems to be having somewhat more success, levying big fines, getting these companies to change,” said Beacon’s Tedford. “The EU has passed these bills, but the U.S., despite these efforts, has not gotten there and is not going to get there for the next two years.”
Money spent by Big Tech to lobby Congress in a huge part of the problem, whereas in Europe, “those lawmakers feel less beholden,” he added.
More than a century ago, President Teddy Roosevelt, known for his “speak softly and carry a big stick” foreign policy, also used his bully pulpit to bust industrial monopolies.
If Khan and her staff want to follow his lead and rein in Big Tech, they need to start picking their future battles more carefully — and carry bigger sticks.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Tom Holland’sSpider-Man on the big screen. Unfortunately, it might be longer than we’d like until he shows up again. The good news is, we have a potential release date for the next movie. One of the most exciting things about the next entry in the series is that it’s expected to take place in a street-level environment. Of course, Holland’s Spider-Man has historically been involved with bigger baddies than just those kinds of criminals. He’s worked with Tony Stark and the Avengers. He saved the universe. Now, it’ll be really cool to see what kinds of villains he gets involved with.
Deadlinerecently reported that Sony has targeted two upcoming release dates for as-yet unnamed Marvel movies. They didn’t reveal their subjects, but it’s widely assumed these projects will be a third Venom movie with Tom Hardy and the fourth Spider-Man starring Tom Holland. Because of the writers’ strike, no work can be done on either movie (or any other pending Sony Marvel projects). So it could be a while before we know definitively one way or another.
Tom Holland has been pretty tight-lipped about what the movie’s actually going to look like. The only real details he’s shared in interviews are that it “looks pretty good,” and that he’s “excited” by the “stuff going on” so far.
“Whether or not it’ll come to fruition, who knows?” he toldDeadline. “But right now it’s looking pretty good, and we’ll just have to wait and see.”
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For 15 years now, people in Hollywood have been trying to get a live-action Robotech movie made. Specifically, a movie based on Robotech’s first and most popular season, which was a Western repackaging of Japanese masterpiece Macross.
Robotech’s original animated intro
In 2007 it was Tobey Maguire leading the charge for a Warner Bros. production that ultimately went nowhere. Eight years later Sony took a swing, with Aquaman director James Wan attached, but it too would eventually wind up cancelled. Now we’re getting a third and more recent attempt, with Sony trying once again, announcing in 2022 that Hawkeye director Rhys Thomas will be trying to get the adventures of Rick Hunter and friends on the big screen.
This third try might have a better chance of actually getting made; aside from regular Hollywood politics and economics, previous attempts were also plagued by a long-running legal standoff that had stymied Western releases of Macross products for decades. They were largely resolved in 2021, clearly paving the way for Sony’s renewed attempts at getting a Robotech movie made.
Anyway, enough background! This is an art feature, not a history lesson. But I needed to spell all that out so that we’re clear about what’s being showcased tonight: a collection of art from that middle project, Sony’s aborted first attempt that, after suffering a big setback in 2018 when Wan bailed to make Aquaman, was quietly cancelled in 2019.
Most illustrations focus on the SDF-1, Macross Island (whose vibes Price absolutely nails here) and redesigned Veritech fighters, though there are also some works showcasing original plot elements (like the oil rigs) that would have been new for this particular film.
With the wind at their back, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan and head of PlayStation Studios Hermen Hulst recently presented the state of the PlayStation 5 ecosystem to investors and hinted at what’s coming in the near future. Among other things, the company promised new IPs, more live-service games, and a big push behind cloud gaming.
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While Sony’s big gaming showcase will offer specific details on new game announcements, release dates, and potential hardware refreshes, the investor presentation was a broader look at the current state of the PlayStation business and where it’s headed next. We got a pretty granular breakdown of some interesting sales data as well as cryptic teases of upcoming initiatives, like Sony’s rumored cloud gaming handheld, Q Lite [Update 5/25/2023 11:07 a.m. ET: the devices was revealed in the showcase and it’s wild looking]. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the company’s latest business meeting.
PS VR2 is already outselling the first virtual reality headset
Sony’s new virtual reality headset is a comfortable but pricey bundle that requires users to already own a PS5, but initial sales numbers show it’s actually tracking ahead of the first PS VR headset. PS VR2 sold 600,000 units in its first six weeks, while the PS VR1 sold closer to 550,000. Whether that momentum will build the platform into something more than an expensive accessory for enthusiasts remains to be seen.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
Analysts previously called for a price cut to fuel sales, and it’s unclear if big new games will arrive without a larger install base, especially as companies like Meta lay off VR developers amid cutbacks.
Sony plans to invest a ton in new franchises
Since the PS5 launched, fans have been waiting to see what new IPs would grow out of the latest console generation. So far it’s been mostly sequels to series that already existed or got their start on the PS4 like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Spider-Man. But Sony revealed that new franchises are planned. PlayStation Studios’ investment in new IP will hit 50 percent in 2025, compared to only 20 percent in 2019. However the lag in production means we might not end up seeing the results of that spending until late in the PS5’s life cycle.
Live-service games will be over half of that spending
Sony’s first-party single-player games have been setting the bar for story-driven blockbusters for years now, from The Last of Us to Ghost of Tsushima. It’s clear the company now wants to do the same for live-service multiplayer games as well, and will be leveraging its recent acquisition of Destiny 2 maker Bungie to achieve that.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
The breakdown of total spending on content this year will be 55 percent on live-service business models vs 45 percent on “traditional” ones. The difference will be even more stark by 2025, when live-service spending will reach 60 percent of seemingly all production costs. It’s possible some of those games will still have a traditional single-player emphasis and just include cosmetic shops, like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Others are sure to be multiplayer-focused affairs more like Destiny 2.
PS5 owners spend a ton on microtransactions
Prestigious exclusives might help sell consoles, but it’s not what makes the most money once players are locked in. Sony revealed that PS5 players are spending over $100 more than PS4 players were at a similar point in the console cycle. That extra money isn’t coming from more games sold, however. It’s coming from spending on add-on content, meaning paid DLC and microtransactions.
Full game sales actually dropped by 10 percent on the PS5, while add-on content grew by 210 percent. Although Sony collects a 30 percent commission on all in-game purchases in Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, and Apex Legends on the platform, it would stand to make a ton more if those purchases were made inside its own first-party exclusives.
Spider-Man sold great on PC while The Last of Us Part I is off to a slower start
2018’s Spider-Man didn’t arrive on PC until last year. In the eight months since it hit PC, the game sold an additional 1.5 million copies on the platform. The Last of Us Part I, meanwhile, has sold 368,000 copies since it arrived on Steam in March. That’s not bad considering it’s a remaster of a decade-old game many people have already played on PS3, PS4, and PS5. But it’s not exactly God of War numbers, which sold nearly a million copies in its first two and a half months on PC.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
It’s not clear how much The Last of Us Part I’s rough performance and poor optimization at launch hurt its initial momentum, compared to the overall increase in sales of the game across all platforms following the success of the hit HBO adaptation. It seems like the port was in part a learning exercise for Naughty Dog, potentially as Sony eyes bringing the rest of its games to PC.
Half of all game releases won’t just be on PS5 by 2025
In the past Sony seemed afraid to cannibalize console sales by releasing its games on PC. Now it’s clear the company is ready to do just the opposite, porting its exclusives and investing in potential mobile spin-offs. The company plans for 50 percent of its releases in 2025 to be either PC or mobile games.
A lot of players are paying for the more expensive PlayStation Plus subscriptions
When Sony unveiled its overhauled PS Plus program, creating three separate tiers and folding its PlayStation Now streaming service into the priciest one, it seemed needlessly complicated. The highest tier, Premium, also didn’t seem worth the extra price in exchange for a slim selection of PlayStation Classics and cloud gaming features that are still a work-in-progress.
Image: Sony / Kotaku
It turns out a lot of people were willing to upgrade, however. Sony says 14.1 million subscribers joined the higher tiers in the first 10 months, which now represent 30 percent of all PS Plus users. And Premium actually accounts for the majority of those with 17 percent of total subscribers, while the middle-tier, Extra, only has 13 percent.
The first PlayStation mobile game will arrive as early as 2023
Sony said it’s currently “partnered with established teams on games,” and “bringing some of our most celebrated IP to mobile,” with the first set to release in fiscal year 2023. The company acquired mobile maker Savage Game Studios last August and Bungie has also long been rumored to be working on a mobile version of Destiny 2. According to Sony’s charts, the mobile gaming market is already bigger than console and PC gaming combined, and it only projects that gap to widen in the coming years.
Sony’s doubling-down on cloud gaming
In the most cryptic part of the presentation, CEO Jim Ryan said the company has “some fairly interesting and quite aggressive plans to accelerate our initiatives in the space of the cloud.” He didn’t elaborate on what those are, but made the comment in the context of mobile gaming and portability. It certainly raises eyebrows since Sony has also now revealed a cloud gaming handheld codenamed Project Q that would be a remote play accessory for the PS5.
PS Plus also doesn’t currently support cloud gaming on smartphones either, requiring you to use a PS4, PS5, or PC. We do know that Sony has been developing a number of patents to decrease latency while streaming games, and The Verge previously reported that the company is hiring for a number of roles to build out its cloud gaming infrastructure. Cloud gaming has been at the center of the regulatory fight over Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, and it seems like whatever the outcome of that proposed merger, Sony wants to take back some of the video game streaming market share it previously ceded to Game Pass and xCloud.
Discord is a pretty good product. It’s an easy way to communicate with friends, find realtime communities around topics of mutual interest, and crucial for making use of voice chat across most online multiplayer games. And now Discord’s decided to muck it all up by forcing everyone to switch to a new username in a giant migration no one seems to understand the reasoning for.
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As things stand, every Discord username is case sensitive and has four digits at the end of it. This lets multiple people adopt the same name and also makes it harder to search for people unless you have their exact handle—a virtue in a world where online harassment has become the norm. The system is occasionally annoying but overall feels befitting the platform’s greater amount of intimacy and privacy, and has helped it become a great hangout space, especially for gaming. Sony and Microsoft recently integrated it directly into the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. And of course it’s also become a hotbed for leaks lately, including classified military reports.
Image: Discord
Not content with that successful status quo, Discord now plans to massively shake things up. “We wanted to make it easier for you to identify and add your friends while preserving your ability to use your preferred name across Discord,” the company announced this week. “So, we are removing discriminators and introducing new, unique usernames (@username) and display names.”
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These changes will arrive in the coming weeks and will initially be voluntary. Eventually, however, everyone will have to move over to the new system. Display names will still exist and be the primary way people are identified in chat, but the underlying username will become similar to the kind used everywhere else, complete with lots of potential duplicates once everyone is forced to change. Many of the initial reactions have not been kind:
Aside from the fact that many Discord users seem to have adopted the platform precisely because it’s not easily searchable like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, there are plenty of other concerns as well. The move could open up more possibilities for fraud and impersonation, as we’ve seen with the recent hellfire on Twitter. There’s also been speculation that some people will now start camping on high profile usernames that belong to streamers and influencers on other platforms. But the biggest issue is that there’s no clear benefit to users with the change.
Discord, on the other hand, is a for-profit startup that needs to continually scale in order to get bought or eventually go public. Like Slack, it can’t just be really good at private messaging and voice channels, it seemingly needs to be a huge social platform all its own. Bleh. There are already genuine concerns about how the company harvests use data, and might potentially exploit it to train AI chat tools. Many of the better features, meanwhile, are locked behind the service’s monthly Nitro subscription.
The platform has been great in recent years, and was a lifeline for many when the pandemic shuttered everyone inside. Who knows what it will become in the future though, and changes like this are never reassuring. In the meantime, game companies keep moving their internet forums to Discord, leaving entire online communities at the mercy of the Silicon Valley growth mindset.
Hollywood writers are on strike for the first time in 15 years, halting production of TV shows and movies.
The Writers Guild of America announced Monday night its boards unanimously approved a strike effective 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. “Picketing will begin tomorrow afternoon,” the WGA said in a tweet Monday night.
E3 is dead. Again. Probably for good this time, given the circumstances. A lot of people have a lot of feelings—a weird thing for regular folks to have, since this was an industry trade show—but one thing we should be remembering through all the tributes and dunks is that E3 didn’t mismanage its way into oblivion. Its demise is exactly what the world’s biggest video game companies wanted.
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Yes, it had its problems that were its own doing, regardless of who was organising the show. Downtown LA sucks. The show’s industry-only focus gave it a sheen that was always a little too uncomfortable to be around. It could never reconcile whether it wanted to be a trade show for developers and retailers or an announcement fest for the world’s media. Downtown LA sucks.
What started killing the show, though, wasn’t any of those things. Those things were inconveniences for those attending, which those of you reading/watching from home could not have given half a shit about. E3 started dying when major companies like Nintendo and Sony began reducing their presence there, or pulling out entirely, and that had nothing to do with the limited dining options available around the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Those companies, from platform holders to major publishers, the real stars of the E3 experience, weren’t really presenters at a trade show. They were gladiators. At its peak—whenever you think that was across its various locations and decades—E3 ran for just a handful of days, but in that time hundreds of major announcements would be made, from new hardware to AAA reveals, and each of them would be vying for the public’s attention. If there was one thing that defined E3 beyond “press conferences”, it would be that every event, and every show, had its own list of “winners” and “losers”, drawn up by forum posters and international media alike. The “winners” could bask in the glory and leverage it for increased exposure and sales, while the “losers” might risk sinking into oblivion.
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Why on earth would any major company want to risk being a gladiator? Why would they look at a scenario where the success of their billion-dollar enterprise could be threatened by some kids deciding a game trailer or new hardware feature was “meh”? Why would they bother sitting down with games press to answer questions when they could just send out press releases?
It’s no surprise that major companies bailing on E3 killed it off. What’s surprising is that it didn’t happen a lot sooner! Like we’ve said before, there’s nothing major video games companies like more than being able to control the entire process of making a sale, from announcement to pre-order. Everything standing in the way of those sales is an obstacle to overcome, and so if E3 was presenting the risk of their games being overshadowed by their competitor’s, then of course they were going to walk away, and when enough companies walked away the show was never going to survive.
They don’t need to pay for big E3 press conferences anymore, they can just film their own presentations and show them on a day when there’s no competing news. They don’t need to walk journalists around for three days answering questions that may be occasionally uncomfortable when they can just get influencers to hype their games live on Twitch and YouTube. And every time they’re doing this, an incentive to pre-order their product—often from their own online store—isn’t far away. The feeding ramp is polished to a mirror sheen.
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Which might explain why earlier today Kotick sent out an email to his entire company—and then posted it on the internet for the whole world to see—which does little but bang his head against the wall repeating the same arguments Microsoft, Activision (and now select US politicians) have been making for months: that the deal is fine, that everything is cool, that Microsoft has made “thoughtful, generous remedies to address regulators’ concerns”.
One thing stands out in this email, though, and it’s a section where Kotick has to juggle maintaining a business relationship with Sony while also wanting to throw them under the bus. Let’s see how he fared (emphasis mine):
The good news is, regulators who initially had concerns about console competition are starting to better understand our industry. The data and evidence Microsoft has been presenting are tilting the scale. You may have seen statements from Sony, including an argument that if this deal goes through, Microsoft could release deliberately “buggy” versions of our games on PlayStation. We all know our passionate players would be the first to hold Microsoft accountable for keeping its promises of content and quality parity. And, all of us who work so hard to deliver the best games in our industry care too deeply about our players to ever launch sub-par versions of our games. Sony has even admitted that they aren’t actually concerned about a Call of Duty agreement—they would just like to prevent our merger from happening. This is obviously disappointing behavior from a partner for almost thirty years, but we will not allow Sony’s behavior to affect our long term relationship. PlayStation players know we will continue to deliver the best games possible on Sony platforms as we have since the launch of PlayStation.
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In other words, “it’s not me, it’s you”. I don’t see any other way he could have put this, to be honest, but then this kind of tiptoeing is exactly why this proposed deal has been so important to the future of the console business: so many grenades have been lobbed by both sides that there’s going to be bad blood here for years regardless of the decision.
Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard inched closer in a big way on Friday. UK regulators announced a provisional finding that the acquisition wouldn’t harm competition, despite previously suggesting the Xbox maker might need to spin-off the Call of Duty business to get the sale approved.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority was initially skeptical of Microsoft’s promises to keepthe military shooteravailable on PlayStation consoles for many years to come, arguing it could have a financial incentive to pull the blockbuster series from the platform in the future. The CMA now says that after receiving more detailed information about Call of Duty player spending, it’s clear that making the series exclusive to Xbox would lose Microsoft a ton of money.
“The CMA inquiry group has updated its provisional findings and reached the provisional conclusion that, overall, the transaction will not result in a substantial lessening of competition in relation to console gaming in the UK,” it wrote in a press release. The CMA continued:
While the CMA’s original analysis indicated that this strategy would be profitable under most scenarios, new data (which provides better insight into the actual purchasing behaviour of CoD gamers) indicates that this strategy would be significantly loss-making under any plausible scenario. On this basis, the updated analysis now shows that it would not be commercially beneficial to Microsoft to make CoD exclusive to Xbox following the deal, but that Microsoft will instead still have the incentive to continue to make the game available on PlayStation.
The CMA is still reviewing Game Pass
The regulatory agency is still investigating the cloud gaming side of the deal, with its final verdict/decision still not due out until 26 April. Call of Duty seemed to be the biggest sticking point in the CMA’s skepticism of the deal, however, and Microsoft seems to have now tentatively assuaged those fears. It’s also been busy shoring up its defense on the cloud gaming front by striking deals with several smaller competitors to guarantee its first-party games will be available on other services if the deal goes through.
One big question that remains is what a final deal between Microsoft and Sony will look like. An Activision spokesperson had previously claimed that Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan was unwilling to negotiate, stating his only objective was to permanently kill the acquisition. As that outcome becomes increasingly unlikely, the PS5 manufacturer will seemingly have no alternative but to hammer out the details of Microsoft’s 10-year Call of Duty proposal.
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Determining the availability of Activision Blizzard games like Diablo IV and an upcoming Black Ops sequel on Game Pass competitor PS Plus will be a key part of that. In its latest argument to the CMA pushing back on Sony’s concerns, Microsoft went so far as to suggest that 10 years would be plenty of time for it to go make its own Call of Duty competitor if it was so concerned about losing it.
In the meantime, Microsoft still needs to get approval from European regulators and deal with an antitrust lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission. But investors seem more hyped for the deal than they’ve ever been. Activision Blizzard’s stock price shot up to $85 a share following the CMA’s latest announcement, more than at any point since the acquisition was announced.
