Sony has said it would have to withhold information about a PlayStation 6 from Activision if it was acquired by Microsoft.
In a new deposition to the US Federal Trade Commission on the matter of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, PlayStation's Jim Ryan made the comments seen below. In short, Ryan says that if Activision was to become a Microsoft-owned company, it would force PlayStation to keep PS6 information away from the publisher.
In an FTC v MS/ABK deposition, PlayStation chief Jim Ryan said that, if deal closes, Sony couldn't tell Activision about its next consoleIs then asked about Sony working with Mojang (Minecraft) after MS bought them. Discussion is redacted but Ryan says it supports this concern pic.twitter.com/M86CBm3CcYJune 21, 2023
According to Ryan, PlayStation working with Mojang, the Microsoft-owned developer who makes Minecraft, actually supports this concern. Because of the redacted nature of the comment, however, there's no real way to work out how PlayStation's work with Mojang supports Ryan's new concerns over Microsoft buying Activision.
As Axios reporter Stephen Totilo recalls in another tweet, Ryan previously stated in December 2022 that Sony had collaborated with Activision on technical features for Call of Duty. The redactions from Ryan's deposition means we don't know what features these are, but it's easy to imagine it being something revolving around the DualSense's adaptive triggers, for example.
This could mean, if Microsoft acquires Activision, that Activision-published games would have less features designed specifically around PlayStation hardware. That's essentially what Ryan's getting at here, although whether that's actually true, or whether Ryan's presenting this as a hypothetical purely to get the merger cancelled is another matter entirely.
This all comes after the FTC recommended blocking Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard King earlier this month. Both Microsoft and Activision Blizzard King said at the time that they plan on appealing the ruling, but for now at least, the potential acquisition looks incredibly unlikely to be allowed to proceed by the US regulator.
Check out our new games 2023 guide for a look ahead at all the games we've got to look forward to throughout the rest of the year.
