Microsoft has issued a statement following yesterday’s news that it had canned the PS5 version of Redfall.
Microsoft has spent a decent chunk of the six months trying to prove to regulatory bodies that its proposed $US69 billion ($AU103 billion) acquisition of Activision Blizzard won’t have any effect on its closest market rival, PlayStation. Despite Sony’s dogged insistence in its belief that Microsoft will lock the popular mega franchise Call of Duty away for itself, Microsoft has pulled every lever in arm’s reach to prove it wrong — ten year deals, repeated platitudes, just as many backhanded compliments. Microsoft has said again and again that it will play ball on Call of Duty. Not only will CoD launch on PlayStation platforms, but it’ll also launch on Nintendo platforms, it’ll launch on Steam, and it will be made at the same high standard it always has been. It won’t be making CoD worse on PlayStation, it won’t be canning any PlayStation versions or making any move to cut PlayStation’s lunch. We’re all friends here.
Until yesterday, despite Sony’s protestations, it seemed like these arguments had left Microsoft with a half-decent chance of getting its way.
And then it emerged that the PlayStation 5 version of its upcoming co-op shooter Redfall had been killed on Microsoft’s orders. The news raised corporate hackles immediately. Despite its insistence that PlayStation versions of Call of Duty would not be impacted in the name of exclusivity, in this case, clearly, exclusivity did matter. And into Sony’s lap fell what appeared to be the precedent it had been looking for.
In a statement issued to Gamespot’s Eddie Makuch overnight, Microsoft has flashed what it hopes is a confidence-projecting Jonathan Frakes grin and said Never Happened.
“We haven’t pulled any games from PlayStation,” reads the statement. “In fact, we’ve expanded our footprint of games that we’ve shipped on Sony’s PlayStation since our acquisition of ZeniMax, and the first two games we shipped after closing were PlayStation 5 exclusives.”
Those games were Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, both of which were under contract to Sony as timed exclusives well before Microsoft acquired Bethesda. The statement goes on to point out that Minecraft, another acquisition, is and remains available on just about every platform ever, and that Bethesda’s library of games remains on the PlayStation Store and continue to receive regular updates. But then Xbox throws in a bit of a curveball at the end that goes against the spirit of everything it has just said — “We have always said that future decisions on whether to distribute ZeniMax games for other consoles will be made on a case-by-case basis.”
It’s a statement that attempts to say something without really saying anything at all. Everything Microsoft says in the statement is true, but it doesn’t address the elephant in the room: the killing of an in-development project bound for the PlayStation 5 before it can make it out the door. Microsoft has been crystal clear that its acquisition of Bethesda was about bolstering the library of exclusives on Game Pass. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft has yoinked Redfall away from the PlayStation 5, but the timing of this particular news couldn’t be worse. And it’s certainly not a good look when Microsoft has been trying to project a sense of unity and transparency about its plans for Call of Duty.
PlayStation’s next move with regulators is now clear for all to see: If it happened to Redfall, it could happen to Call of Duty. Microsoft will now need to carefully consider its next move.
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