Crash Bandicoot PS4 PlayStation 4 1

Microsoft, still meticulously navigating its way through the legal red tape required to seal its Activision Blizzard acquisition, has once again insinuated that it will not make the publisher’s games exclusive. Earlier in the year, it was very clear that “great titles like Call of Duty will continue to be available on the Sony PlayStation”. It even suggested it wants to expand the horizons for said brands, inferring some entries could also come to Nintendo Switch.

As part of a media briefing, it’s reiterated that point: “If we acquire a game that comes with a big community across a number of platforms, the last thing we want to do is take something away,” Xbox Game Studios bigwig Matt Booty declared. “If anything, we feel that it's our job to be caretakers, to be shepherds, to continue to build and nurture that community, not to cut it up into pieces and try to take some of it away.”

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Of course, the caveat here is that you could argue there are large PlayStation communities for, say, The Elder Scrolls – but Microsoft has confirmed that the next entry in that series will be exclusive, whenever it actually arrives. The same, to a lesser extent, could be said of Hellblade – the original of which released first on PS4, before coming to other platforms. Its successor, however, will be exclusive to Xbox Series X|S.

So it seems like, while there will be a continuation of Activision Blizzard’s games on PlayStation, it’ll all be on Microsoft’s terms. Which makes sense, given that it’s spending near-$70 billion on the publisher, but it’s still potentially a bit of a bummer for those who prefer to play on PS5 and PS4. Would a new Crash Bandicoot game, for example, come to Sony’s consoles? Based on Booty’s comments about “big communities”, we’d assume so, as the character was formerly the PS1’s mascot – but it’s still very much up in the air, isn’t it?

[source ign.com]