10 years is a long time. The landscape could definitely change where they don’t put COD on Playstation after that. Microsoft only started making those offers after there was regulatory scrutiny. I would bet a lot of money there is no new COD on Playstation in 10 years and 1 day.

And nobody is going to point to Spyro, Crash, or Tony Hawk being exclusive as a big loss for Playstation. Blizzard already released Diablo 4. Overwatch 2 is already out. Warcraft/Starcraft arent on consoles. Basically the rest of Activision is just pumping out COD. No word on that Infinity Ward game since last year, which was just an article about hiring for a position and no details on an actual game. Assuming Activision actually revived an old IP theyre sitting on or made a new one it would likely take 5+ years of dev time, at which point Sony would miss out on it anyway with a 5 year deal

I think they meant more with Gold you always have access to those games. With a sub the available games can come and go, so you may lose access to specific games if they leave the service.

I agree with FF16 being the best of the titles.

I think the shine of Diablo 4 wore off real quick once people got to the end game which is very repetitive and absolutely horribly balanced.

Street Fighter 6 is an excellent game but fighting games will always have trouble appealing to the masses. I’d say its probably higher for me on a 10 point scale than FF16 so far but again, it’ll never win what is basically a popularity contest.

Im about 70% of the way through FF16 and liking it so far, but definitely not perfect. FF16 takes too long to build up the combat system. Now that I have 3+ eikons there are a lot more decisions to make both in my build and in second-to-second gameplay, but when I only had 1-2 it was a lot of mashing square. The story has also gotten a lot more interesting about half way through.

Otherwise for June there wasnt much at all. I dont even think Amnesia had a PS5 version. Layers of Fear wasnt great. What else even was there?

The offers were 5 years for all ABK games or 10 years for only COD. When you look at the pipeline of upcoming ABK games, what is even coming out in the next 5 years that would make up for 5 years of lost COD revenue? Plus, if the new consoles are really out in 2028 having COD not playable on the PS6 would be huge for the start of the generation. Sony probably made the right choice here

I mean…a giant corporation is always going to get what it wants, so I’m not surprised the deal will close. However, the FTC clearly had no idea what they were doing and attacked this case from the worst angle possible by focusing on COD and honestly seemed like their goal was to protect Sony as the market leader rather than protect consumers from Microsoft’s eventual future stranglehold on cloud gaming and gaming subscription services

Just waiting for Amazon to buy EA or Ubisoft and have them say its exclusice for Amazon Luna subscribers and gamers to go “wow, this is great I can finally play Assassins Creed on my phone and it increases competition!”