Microsoft has revealed that upcoming third-party games like the Silent Hill 2 remake and Final Fantasy 16 won’t release on Xbox, seemingly because of exclusion agreements between Sony and certain publishers.
In a new filing, which is a response to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ‘s Activision Blizzard acquisition lawsuit, Microsoft is defending itself by stating that Sony is intentionally preventing several highly-anticipated games from releasing on Xbox platforms (thanks, Eurogamer).
“In addition to having outright exclusive content, Sony has also entered into arrangements with third-party publishers which require the ‘exclusion’ of Xbox from the set of platforms these publishers can distribute their games on,” reads Microsoft’s statement. “Some prominent examples of these agreements include Final Fantasy 7 Remake (Square Enix), Bloodborne (From Software), the upcoming Final Fantasy 16 (Square Enix), and the recently announced Silent Hill 2 remastered (Bloober team).”
Timed exclusives are relatively common in Sony’s business strategy, though most assumed that games like the Silent Hill 2 remake would eventually land on Xbox Series X|S. However, these filings claim otherwise.
All of this, yet again, comes back to concerns from Sony that if Microsoft successfully acquires Activision Blizzard – Call of Duty could become an Xbox console exclusive
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
