According to a recent report, Microsoft claim sony Pay for “blocking rights” to prevent developers from adding their games to Xbox Game Pass.
As The Verge reports, the rather significant allegation comes as part of a number of documents that have been filed with Brazil’s national competition watchdog, as well as part of a review of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
“Microsoft’s ability to continue expanding Game Pass has been hampered by Sony’s desire to curb this growth,” Microsoft itself claimed in a filing to the Administrative Council on Economic Defense (CADE) (translated from The Verge). “Sony pays for ‘blocking rights’ to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services.”
As The Verge points out, it’s unclear what this means in practice. The darkest possibility is that Sony doesn’t actually allow its financially-backed developers to put games from those developers on Game Pass. But it could also be a simple matter of Sony paying for exclusive rights to its own services, like the recently revamped PlayStation Plus. Some distribution contracts may contain clauses that prevent games from appearing on Game Pass or other similar services.
Microsoft may have made this claim in its investigation of its acquisition of Activision Blizzard because of its anticompetitive potential, something Sony is fully aware of.
The filing to CADE has been dismantled by a user on ResetEra, noting that Sony has previously pointed out that it would be difficult to create a franchise that could potentially compete with Activision. call-of-duty. It also claims that the series is a “standalone gaming category,” which isn’t the case, although it can’t be argued that if Call of Duty were exclusive to Xbox, Sony would be missing out on a ton of revenue.
