Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree – will From’s next game be a PS5 exclusive? (Bandai Namco)
A reader is angry at the thought of Sony buying the makers of Dark Souls and Elden Ring and blames Microsoft for starting the trend.
When the news about Sony buying FromSoftware’s parent company emerged it seemed like just another rumour and not even a particularly believable one, given the complications involved. And yet within a matter of days we got confirmation that they really were interested and while that doesn’t guarantee the sale, it does make it very likely. I blame Microsoft for this.
I have both an Xbox and PlayStation, so I don’t consider myself bias one way or another, but this rush to buy up every publisher and developer possible was started by Microsoft and it was always obvious what it would lead to. Sony is simply trying to play by their game and now we’re in a position where there’s drastically less big name publishers than there were a decade ago.
Microsoft shut down a lot of its first party developers at the end of the Xbox 360 era and when Phil Spencer took over he rightly realised this had been a mistake and so started buying up developers. None of those made a difference to their bottom line though, so then they bought Bethesda. Then, when that didn’t make any difference either, they bought Activision Blizzard. The rest is history.
Xbox make lots of money now but only by doing exactly what Activision Blizzard did already: sell games on all formats. None of this has helped the Xbox console, which is quickly being sidelined, and it’s not hard to guess what’s going to happen to these other developers now that Microsoft has a cash cow and they don’t have to worry about all these smaller companies.
Spending money is the only thing Microsoft knows how to do when things turned pear-shaped, but they must’ve known what they were setting in motion when they started buying up other companies.
It’s not even just Sony that has responded but other big publishers that have realised that if they want developers for themselves, even if they were happy dealing with them as independents, they have no choice but to buy them before they become the next target for Microsoft.
There’s good reason to think that Sony bought Bungie to keep them out of Microsoft’s grasp, as much as they wanted them for themselves. I’m sure there’s a lot of people at Sony that regret buying Bungie now and yet on the other hand at least they weren’t snapped up by Microsoft.
Don’t get me wrong, I think all of these acquisitions are awful and bad for the industry, but Sony and the others had to respond in kind or the percentage of the industry that Microsoft owns would be even bigger than it is now.
It would have been so much better if FromSoftware had remained independent but now they’re likely going to be making PlayStation exclusives from now on. That would’ve been the case with everyone Microsoft bought too, if the Xbox console hadn’t been too far gone by that point already.
It’s not even hard to guess who’ll be next, with Ubisoft circling the drain. Then who’s left? EA, Take-Two, and… Warner Bros.? That’s it in terms of Western publishers. And to think how many there used to be only a few years ago, all trying to compete with each other and gamers benefiting from that competition with better games.
Now everything is owned by just a handful of different companies and there’s no real competition at all, just a conveyor of product where anything that isn’t a massive hit instantly gets the entire studio shut down.
I don’t know how bad it’s going to get before the end. Will someone buy EA? Will the Japanese publishers start getting bought up as well? Will it all end where the entire industry is literally just Microsoft vs. Sony? I don’t know but I do know I don’t like it.
By reader Pinky
It’s a scorched earth policy for Microsoft and Sony (Bandai Namco)
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