The Redmond company has named two third-party (i.e., not directly owned by Sony) IPs in its 111-page response to the UK’s CMA (yesterday we wrote about their 37-page response to the US FTC – they’re getting their hands dirty, that’s for sure…)

“Exclusivity strategies are not uncommon in the games industry, and other market participants have access to their content. Sony’s and Nintendo’s exclusive first-party games rank among the best-selling in Europe and worldwide. Current Sony exclusive content includes prominent first-party titles such as The Last of Us, Ghosts of Tsushima, God of War, and [Marvel’s] Spider-Man.

In addition to having exclusive content, Sony has also entered into arrangements with third-party publishers requiring the “exclusion” of Xbox from the set of platforms these publishers can distribute their games on. Some prominent examples of these agreements include Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix), Bloodborne (From Software), the upcoming Final Fantasy XVI (Square Enix), and the recently announced Silent Hill 2 Remake (Bloober Team). Nintendo’s exclusive content includes well-established globally famous and iconic franchises such as Super Mario, Zelda, Xenoblade, Pokémon, and Animal Crossing,” Microsoft says.

However, it is yet again looking for a thorn in the side of others while a beam is sticking out of Microsoft’s eye. Starfield won’t be on PlayStation 5, and it’s not out of the question that it will never get a native port (even the Xbox Game Pass version running from the cloud can be ruled out). Sony is fearful that Microsoft’s $68.7 billion deal for Activision Blizzard King could close for good reason because, despite the Redmond tech company’s claims that it would keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for ten years, Microsoft can pull the plug on the whole thing with the stroke of a pen.

So Microsoft is complaining about what it is doing.

Source: WCCFTech