The console war just keeps on raging. Well, at least one side of that war is keeping things heated. I’m reminded of that classic situation when one person wants to fight and the other doesn’t. Well, Sony seems to be the person trying to fight – as Xbox sits back and attempts to do their best to not fight.
If you haven’t been keeping up, Microsoft purchased some game studios, which left Sony seemingly unable to release those games on their end. However, this isn’t always the case. Although Xbox owns Activision, they have still agreed to allow Sony to release titles like Call of Duty on their system. It wasn’t something they had to do. They decided to play it cool and allow them the rights to one of the world’s largest game franchises.
It doesn’t appear that Sony is going to take that same approach though. Most recently, it appears that they are attempting to block their game publishers from allowing Microsoft a chance at remaking Silent Hill 2.
Now, Microsoft released a statement stating that Sony “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.”
Microsoft’s purchases of multiple game studios have lead Sony to take legal action that involved the FTC. All of this has put Microsoft in a strange position with the FTC. The biggest argument is that Sony has done this plenty of times in the past and has had several exclusive games that Xbox wasn’t allowed to touch. Now that Sony is being given back some of their own medicine they made sure to make a big deal out of it. Naughty Dog only made games for Sony and nobody had an issue with that. So, I fail to see why NOW, it is a big deal.
We will have to see where all this turns out. But, it looks like the future is going to be made up of game studio purchases and more exclusives.