Most people who follow games know that Microsoft, the recent apex predator of games, has been on a buying spree. They have been bolstering their portfolio to flesh out what they have to offer for their Game Pass service. In the beginning they started small but in recent months the purchases have been getting bigger and bigger. When it was announced that they had purchased Activision Blizzard to the tune of about $70 billion it gave me pause.
I love my Xbox and I am a devout Game Pass subscriber but the purchase announced in January made me wonder about the future of the industry. Microsoft just purchased “the” largest or one of the three largest video game publishers in the world. It is akin to Apple purchasing AMD or Intel. It is a huge purchase that has ramifications across the gaming spectrum.
After I heard the news, I wondered if the console wars had effectively been turned into a battle of East vs. West. Microsoft is working hard to gobble up all of the western developers in the Americas and Europe. Sony and Nintendo are left in Japan trying to hobble to keep up. I’m sure that Nintendo, as always, will be able to sit in their corner and bring in a tidy profit for their shareholders but Sony, who has been the king for so long, has been lagging behind recently. Their subscription service, while amazing in this author’s opinion, just can’t hold a candle to Xbox’s Game Pass.
It was announced this week that Sony had acquired Bungie but Bungie would continue to make games for all platforms. There are rumors that Sony has some other acquisitions that it wants to proceed with in the coming months. If this is true, can Sony keep up with Microsoft. Who knows?
I think the first thing Sony needs to do is get as many people as possible moved over to their PlayStation Now service. Microsoft did this by combining their Xbox Live service and their Game Pass service into a combo and then throwing the Xbox Live service out the window. PlayStation needs to look into doing the same thing with their services.
I pay for both PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now. I picked up PlayStation Now a few years ago on sale at a criminally low price so I am set up with that service for the next few years. I think for PlayStation 5 customers they need to get them started on a combined service as soon as possible. The fact is that people don’t want to be double billed by a company for something that they could provide for one price. And Microsoft proved that it doesn’t even matter if that price is high than they were originally paying, as long as the value is there.
Sony has been making some small acquisitions but overall Sony, not PlayStation, as a company just can’t compete because it’s business isn’t as healthy as Microsoft’s overall. Many of the various departments within Sony are not holding up against competitors which means that the PlayStation division doesn’t have as much money to throw at growing their business.
How will Sony keep up with Microsoft?
I believe that Japanese companies will band together to support Sony as a way to fend off Microsoft’s encroachment into their territory. Microsoft has always had a hell of a time getting the Xbox to make any headway in Japan and even with Game Pass, Japanese gamers haven’t gotten on board with the insane value that Game Pass provides. (Japanese Netflix also lags behind America because that isn’t how Japan watches TV usually.)
The Bungie acquisition looks good on paper to shareholder but overall it doesn’t give me hope that Sony is taking these moves by Microsoft as seriously as they need to be. I want to see a strong video game industry and moving towards services instead of boxes is where the industry is heading without question. We need Sony to step it up and become the HBO Max of video game services to Microsoft’s Netflix to keep this whole thing interesting. Right now Sony is looking more like Crackle. If that reference is still applicable in this day and age.
