Rivers of ink have already been written about what is perhaps the toughest fight the video game industry has seen in many years. Sony tries by all means to stop the takeover of Activision Blizard by Microsoft, and they don’t care whether they have to lie or not.
It is the only major competitor that belligerently opposed the deal. And in part, it is normal for them to defend their business, but the way to do it is not adequate. Xbox has already struck deals with Nintendo, Steam, and other major publishers, so there’s a deal for everyone.
Phil Spencer: No words to chew
In the latest podcast from Second requestthe director of Microsoft suffered a lot from the way Jim Ryan’s team is trying to grow. A plan and a way of apprehending the industry which collides head-on with that proposed by Shawn Layden, by the way.
For Spencer, the way Sony wants to grow is to eclipse Xbox and any other competitors that might pose a threat to them.
There’s really only been one big opponent to the deal, and that’s Sony. And Sony is trying to protect its console dominance, and the way they’re expanding is to make the Xbox smaller. They have a vision of the industry very different from ours.
They don’t ship their launch games on PC, they don’t put their games on PS Plus when they launch, they launch… But because Sony is conducting all the dialogue about why this deal shouldn’t be done for protect their dominance on console, what they cling to is Call of Duty.
The FTC finally gave in to Sony’s insinuations and seeing that it couldn’t stop the purchase with arguments, it let a court decide the case. Its main argument was that Microsoft lied to the European Commission with the Bethesda exclusives, but the European Commission itself said that argument was deliberately false.
Brad Smith himself, vice president of Microsoft, said that he would have liked to resolve this issue amicably, but that If you have to solve this the hard way, they won’t be intimidated. By the way, this isn’t the first time that Spencer, who has always been shown as a quiet guy, has taken shots at Sony for his belligerent attitude.
