A variation of this rumor pops up every few years. Maybe this is more reliable?
Talk about burying the lede.
Some of the names being thrown around as possible acquisitions by Microsoft are, frankly, astounding, even unthinkable. But the fact that they are doing the rounds is instructive. The most recent one we heard (from a reliable source close to Microsoft) was, in fact, Electronic Arts. We also heard a whisper about Valve and about Korean outfit PUBG Corp., which Microsoft last year signed to a timed exclusive for its hit survival shooter, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
Valve would be expensive as hell for essentially the Half-Life brand. They’d also be buying the publishing business, but that doesn’t do anything to their lack of Xbox exclusives. And, hell, the folks who made Half-life aren’t even at Valve anymore. They’re not really a development studio at this point.
EA would be expensive, and I can’t see them suddenly cutting all the EA Sports games off from the PlayStation market.
Honestly, until I see this corroborated, only the PUBG purchase sounds plausible. Not to say that Microsoft hasn’t looked at acquiring EA and Valve before and won’t do so again. The rub is how serious they are about it.
Microsoft didn’t cut Minecraft off from other platforms, but still gets big money from it everywhere.
In the unlikely event that Microsoft purchases EA, I could easily see a scenario where Madden still comes to everything, but non-sports EA games become Microsoft exclusives.
I could see them buying PUBG off of Tencent, but not Tencent itself.
And, yeah, in the event of EA, sports would probably be multiplatform, but they have to keep something exclusive, otherwise why even bother buying EA in the first place?
It could be that MS has had a close look at Anthem and likes what they see.
They did ensure that Microsoft and others have the best versions, the ones that play together, which Playstation for some reason didn’t want to be a part of- So yeah, they will most surely make their own platforms the most interesting.
Its not really something we have to spend amazing amounts of time discussing, but that still doesn’t preclude things included in the contract that is detrimental to Sony. If I was Microsoft, I would do this, and then sigh and say “oh but we tried, yes we tried”. Which is technically true, but the outcome was a given. This is not uncommon in business.
Sure. Sony may have perfectly good reasons on their end to not cross-play, but the fact remains that it can technically be done, MS has publicly offered, and unless you have intimate knowledge otherwise, it’s weird to definitively drop the blame on MS.
We’ve literally had Epic accidentally enable it for a couple of nights in Fortnite with a quick toggle.
Yeah, no. By all dev accounts, that one is all Sony. The same company who thinks that EA access is not good value for players.
Microsoft would gain from Cross Play as they are behind in install base and it would only increase the multiplayer base and ability for people to play witjh friends on the other console. You can pretty much count on their offer being genuine.
Oh, my apologies. If it’s weird to speculate without intimate knowledge then I utterly and sincerely retract my posts. I am sorry to use common business sense and hypothetize about gaming on a gaming forum. I’ll stay out of this now so that those of you with REAL insights can talk. 🤣
If you’re Sony, what does cross play bring to you? You’re already the number-one platform this gen, by far. Your players are not crying out to be allowed to play against Xbox gamers. They probably wouldn’t even notice if it happened.
In this case, the benefit is all to Microsoft, so no surprise the answer is no.
