The story between Microsoft and regulators reveals nothing new about the video game industry. On this occasion, and digging up one of Microsoft’s responses to the CMA where they give different reasons for approving the deal, it says that Activision is not the biggest external publisher of PlayStation and Xbox, but in fact EA would be.
In the report submitted to the CMA On Microsoft’s side, there was quite a bit of argument and analysis from the industry, including the biggest publishers categorized as third parties, as well as the biggest game developers. The surprise comes when they say that EA is the biggest external publisher for PlayStation and Xbox, so there would be Ubisoft and Take-Two, leaving Activision in fifth place on the table.
PlayStation users buy games from different publishers on their console. EA is the largest third-party publisher supplying games to PlayStation, followed by Ubisoft and Take-Two.
Activision’s importance in the industry and its power in the exclusives market
Things change your perspective a bit when we take into account that Activision plays a big role in the industry, but that doesn’t become a differentiator for gamers when buying a console. Despite being one of the biggest publishers, Sony itself is bigger as a publisher than Activision Blizzard King.
With the above we see that Sony has become the fourth publisher in the world, being the fourth most relevant for users of its own console. In this way, Microsoft claims that the relevance of the blue brand is very high, even without containing Activision within its publishers. This is represented graphically with the 286 games that Sony PlayStation has produced which are exclusive to any other platform.
In fact, Sony offers 286 games exclusive to the PlayStation, including some of the most successful and popular games like God of War, Spider-Man and Last of Us (which -Sony- thanks to its multimedia production business – is recently became a major and successful TV show)
All of the above will gain strength with the statements about Sony’s production model performance that they will sooner or later provide to the FTC. Although Sony refused, the regulator forced the company to provide this data for the sake of Microsoft’s investigation and declaration in favor of buying Activision.
