Microsoft admits that PlayStation has more and better exclusives
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“Sony has more exclusive video games than Microsoft, many of them of better quality,” says the Xbox company itself in response to the agency investigating the purchase of Activision.
Movements in the video game industry after the decision of the CMA (United Kingdom competition regulatory agency) to continue investigating the possible purchase of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft. On the one hand, Sony has responded by making clear its refusal to the transaction and assuring that its rival’s “true strategy” is to “turn PlayStation into Nintendo”, on the other, Microsoft has counter argued that the purchase does not harm the competition because PlayStation has more and better exclusives than Xbox.
In a statement responding to the CMA, Microsoft claims that Sony is the “dominant console provider” and a “powerful video game distributor” that is “equivalent in size to Activision and nearly twice the size of Microsoft’s distribution business.” The Xbox company also talks about some of the main PlayStation sagas, such as God of War or The Last of Us, describing them as iconic.
PlayStation had five times as many exclusives as Xbox in 2021
To reinforce its argument, which tries to defend that the purchase of Activision does not hurt competition in this sector as much as many are trying to see, Microsoft explains that PlayStation had “more than 280 first and third-party exclusives in 2021, almost five times more than Xbox”. In the statement, the company literally admits that “Sony has more exclusive video games than Microsoft, many of them of better quality”, and specifically mentions some “prominent first-party games such as The Last of Us, Ghost of Tsushima, God of War and Spider-Man.”
The original document also included a graph that would show that Sony exclusives have more weight in global sales than Xbox ones, although it is censored in the version that has been published for the public.
On the other hand, the statement does not shy away from pointing out that Sony has “reached agreements with third parties that require the exclusion of Xbox from the platforms on which they can distribute their games”, including examples such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, Bloodborne, Final Fantasy XVI or Silent Hill 2 Remake. It also concludes that if Nintendo can compete without Call of Duty, Sony could too ; on this last point they insist that the big N is not dedicated exclusively to family games, but also host games for adults on their platforms.
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