Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has said that the company won’t be able to share PlayStation 6 information with Activision Blizzard if it’s acquired by Microsoft, complicating matters when it comes to video game development.
Sony can’t talk about PlayStation 6 with a rival’s development studio
Microsoft has repeatedly said that it has no incentive to make Call of Duty games (or other existing Activision titles, for that matter) console exclusive to Xbox, and that doing so would incur heavy losses. Sony is concerned that if Activision Blizzard does indeed become a Microsoft studio, it would have to send over a dev kit to a rival’s development company and that would equate to spilling its technology secrets.
In a deposition dated April 2023, Ryan was quizzed if Sony had similar concerns when dealing with Minecraft maker Mojang, his response to which has been redacted except for the part where he alluded that it was a point of concern for Sony at that time, too.
Microsoft expressed similar concerns when MLB The Show went multiplatform. The company said that it had to “trust” Sony San Diego with pre-release Xbox Series X|S consoles to get the game on its platforms.
