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The Federal Trade Commission hearing with Microsoft and Activision has dealt heavily with exclusive games. But according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, there shouldn’t even be console-exclusive games to begin with.
Satya Nadella says Sony has “defined market competition using exclusives”
As reported by The Verge, Nadella said he would even get rid of exclusives, but it wasn’t Microsoft’s place to define those terms, given its status as a “low share player in the console market.” He then said Sony’s prominence has “defined market competition using exclusives,” so that is the standard.
“If it was up to me, I would love to get rid of the entire exclusives on consoles, but that’s not for me to define especially as a low share player in the console market,” said Nadella. “The dominant player there [Sony] has defined market competition using exclusives, so that’s the world we live in. I have no love for that world.”
This comes just as Final Fantasy 16 released exclusively on PlayStation 5, and has been a pattern for Sony. Ghostwire: Tokyo, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Sifu, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Deathloop, Humanity, Stray, Tchia, Bugsnax, and Forspoken are just some of the exclusives or console exclusives Sony has nabbed in the last few years, only a handful of which have made their way to Xbox. And these, of course, sit alongside Sony’s slate of first-party exclusives like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Marvel’s Wolverine, God of War Ragnarök, and Horizon Forbidden West.
Nadella also once again committed to shipping Call of Duty on PlayStation, which is not only consistent with his stance on exclusives, but also with the other Xbox employees who have said the same thing.
Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan couldn’t quite commit to the same stance in a hypothetical scenario presented by Microsoft’s lawyer. When asked if he would put Call of Duty and other Activision games on PlayStation if he were at Xbox, he said he “[didn’t] wish to answer” and that he “[didn’t] have enough knowledge to answer that question.”