Last week, the creative director behind the upcoming vampire shooting game Redfall claimed Microsoft shut down a PlayStation version of the game to make it exclusive on Xbox. In response, Microsoft denies that it hasn't “pulled any games from PlayStation.”
Harvey Smith is the creative director at Arkane, the company building Redfall. ZeniMax Media is the parent company of Arkane and Microsoft purchased ZeniMax for $7.5 billion in 2021. In an interview last week, Smith said “We were acquired by Microsoft and it was a change with capital C. They came in and said, ‘No PlayStation 5, we're focusing on Xbox, PC and Game Pass.”
Smith never said if a PS5 version was in development and Microsoft shut it down or if there never was a plan to launch Redfall on PlayStation. Speaking to Eurogamer, Microsoft says it has not pulled games from PlayStation:
“We haven't pulled any games from PlayStation. In fact, we've expanded our footprint of games that we've shipped on Sony's PlayStation since our acquisition of ZeniMax, and the first two games we shipped after closing were PlayStation 5 exclusives. We did the same thing since our closing of Minecraft as we extended the reach of that franchise.
All of the games that were available on PlayStation when we acquired ZeniMax in March 2021 are still available on PlayStation, and we have continued to do content updates on PlayStation and PC. We have always said that future decisions on whether to distribute ZeniMax games for other consoles will be made on a case-by-case basis.”
What this Means
Pretty vague stuff from Microsoft. What is clear is that Redfall will not be available on Sony PlayStation. So, Microsoft is forcing it to be an exclusive on Xbox. However, the company says it never pulled the game, which suggests exclusivity was planned from day one of development.
Of course, this is happening amid Microsoft facing regulatory scrutiny over its plan to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion. Critics of the deal – Sony the most vocal – argue Microsoft will make Activision franchise exclusive to Xbox.
Tip of the day: It's a good idea to backup your computer on a regular basis, and the most fool-proof way is to manually create a disk image and save it to an external hard drive.
