A fan render imagining what the PS6 might look like (Picture: Sony PlayStations)
A reader offers his perspective on the Activision Blizzard acquisition and why he thinks streaming was more important than Call Of Duty.
We’ve all sent emails we didn’t mean to but I think the one from PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, that was brought up at the court case for the Activision Blizzard acquisition may be one of the most costly mistakes ever. I imagine it was one of the primary reasons why the FTC, and by association Sony, lost the case, since it admits that Sony knew Microsoft had no intention of making Call Of Duty an exclusive.
“They’re thinking bigger than that, and they have the cash to make moves like this,’ says Ryan. ‘I’m pretty sure we will continue to see COD on PlayStation for many years to come.’ It’s the first part of that which I find interesting because it alludes to a wider game plan from Microsoft, that has nothing to do with individual games or anything that’s going on at the moment.
There’s no way to know exactly what Ryan meant but I think it’s pretty obvious he was referring to what Microsoft will do for the next generation, as they pretty much admitted, in the court case, that they’ve already lost this one and that just trying again in the usual manner isn’t going to work. Microsoft is going to need to do something different next time and Sony knows it, and so does the CMA and all the rest. That’s what the whole Activision Blizzard business was really about.
The CMA, the UK’s monopoly investigators, get bad mouthed a lot by some people but I think they’ve acted very sensibly during this whole thing. They had exactly the same concerns as the EU and FTC, with the EU only narrowly allowing Microsoft to go ahead and the FTC trying and failing to stop them. What all three were worried about is that while it doesn’t make much difference right now Microsoft is setting itself up to be the king of game streaming.
Streaming doesn’t really work at the moment because broadband is too unreliable but that will change soon enough, within the next 10 years for most non-rural areas. By that point, Microsoft will have all the hardware and software issues sorted out – they’ll basically be waiting for broadband to catch up – and they’ll have lots of good content under their control, because of all the companies they’ve bought.
Remember that Call Of Duty is only multiformat for 10 years, but Microsoft is basically treading water till then anyway, so they don’t care. Once the next generation kicks in, and streaming starts to take over, they’ll be unstoppable and Sony will have no answer. Not because they lack innovation or anything but simply because they haven’t got the money to compete.
This is what the monopoly investigators were worried about and Microsoft only won because you can’t prove what might happen in the future, one way or the other. (Although I’d say the FTC’s lawyers and arguments were pretty lousy throughout.)
Sony is as aware of this as anyone else and that’s what all this live service stuff is about. I don’t know why they think that’s the answer to the upcoming problems but at least they are trying something different, because they obviously know that the PlayStation 6 will never work if it’s just the PlayStation 5 but more powerful.
Frankly, I think the PlayStation 6, as we would all imagine it, is doomed before it starts and that Sony is preparing for that eventuality. Maybe they’ll release it anyway, because it’ll probably be out in about four years, before streaming takes over, but I don’t think it’ll last long or be very successful.
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Instead, I think the future of PlayStation hardware is not something that looks like the PlayStation 5 but the Project Q. People are scoffing at that at the moment, because it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose, but imagine if streaming was a thing… it’d be the most obvious and desirable form factor you could have for a console.
PlayStation 6 is either not going to happen or will be quietly mothballed after a few years. That’s the future of gaming and what the Activision Blizzard takeover was really about it. Microsoft lost the console wars the way Sony played them and now they’re changing the rules, and naturally they’re doing it so they have the advantage…
By reader Combi
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A reader offers his perspective on the Activision Blizzard acquisition and why he thinks streaming was more important than Call Of Duty.
