Trust no one (Picture: Metro.co.uk)

A reader is frustrated by the recent FTC court battle with Microsoft and feels it should signal the end of fanboyism across the board.

So, the court case that’s been going on all this week is finally over and I think we’re meant to get an answer to who has ‘won’ next week or the week after. Well, I can tell you who lost: both Microsoft and Sony. I know they’re just big businesses and we shouldn’t expect anything else, but the amount of lies and misinformation coming out of almost everyone that spoke was just disgusting. I’m not sure I even believe the Activision guy talking about the Switch 2.

I’m not clear if they knew all this was going to come out. I’m not Phoenix Wright but I thought the prosecution had to share their evidence with the other side and vice versa but I dunno, maybe this was different. But if the heads of Xbox and PlayStation did walk into that courtroom knowing there was proof that they had been talking nonsense then I really don’t know what they were playing at.

It started off with an email from Sony boss Jim Ryan, saying that he knew that Microsoft weren’t buying Activision Blizzard to make Call Of Duty an exclusive. He knew but he complained about it non-stop anyway, because he knew that was the best way to get the deal as a whole stopped, which so far seems to be working as planned.

Then we had Xbox saying that they hadn’t decided whether The Elder Scrolls 6 and other established franchises would be exclusives or not, only for a couple of days later for it to turn out they were lying and it had all been decided two years ago. Just outrageous.

There was other stuff too, like when Microsoft tried to pretend that nobody except the UK had said no to them yet and someone from Canada immediately wrote in and said they hadn’t decided yet (and obviously neither has the US). It’s just… why lie about something like that? Especially when you’re going to get embarrassed to hell and back about it almost immediately.

I don’t like to think of myself as a fanboy, as I’ve owned consoles from each company before and make my choices based purely on price, games, hardware, etc. So it’s not like some cherished image of my favourite company has been shattered but, really, who would willingly claim to be an Xbox or PlayStation fan after all this behaviour?

I’m not an Xbox fan, I’m a fan of Halo, Fable, and Hi-Fi Rush. I’m not a PlayStation fan, I’m a fan of The Last Of Us, God Of War, and Horizon. That’s healthy and understandable. Saying you’re a fan of the box that plays these games or, much worse, the company that sells them makes no sense. It never did. Who claims to be a fan of a Blu-ray player or Warner Bros. but not Paramount? People are just fans of movies and the people that make them, just as it should be for games.

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I don’t know if anything is going to change as a result of this week, because I don’t know how closely people were paying attention – probably not much given I don’t think anyone thought it would be this ‘interesting.’ But they really should, because it shows just how little these companies care about being honest or doing what’s best for the format rather than the shareholders, let alone the fans.

Although the other thing that struck me is just how incompetent these people are most of the time. From Sony’s Sharpie disaster to Microsoft’s badly prepared lawyers, you wonder how these people tie their shoes in the morning, let alone run billion-dollar businesses. We don’t owe them our loyalty but after everything that’s been revealed this week, and what that implies about all the things we didn’t find out about, they sure owe us.

By reader Dalton

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A reader is frustrated by the recent FTC court battle with Microsoft and feels it should signal the end of fanboyism across the board.