People are pouring through 1.3 million documents released by hackers who invaded Insomniac Games, demanded to be paid, and then unleashed them to public when they weren’t.
While certain information like employee information should never be shared, and spoilers for upcoming releases and games would be rather cruel to reveal, there are some more relevant news stories as it relates to Sony as a whole.
In particular, there is one non-Insomniac-specific document that details Sony’s concerns about the Microsoft purchase of Activision, which has been finalized recently. While some other documents in the case revealed that execs like Jim Ryan were not actually concerned about losing Call of Duty exclusivity, there are other real issues presented here.
In the documents, Sony states concerns over Microsoft being able to “leapfrog” them with the Activision acquisition, based on what it would bring to something like Game Pass, which Sony views as a massive threat to PS+. It also knows that Microsoft will put Activision games on Game Pass day and date, including something like Call of Duty at least by 2027, making them much more attractive than a $70 PlayStation purpose.
They are also concerned about things that have not come to pass, and that Microsoft says will not come to pass, as of their court testimony. That’s things like timed exclusivity or different features in big games like Call of Duty. But we don’t yet have the released games to know for sure whether or not that will be true.
Perhaps the most interesting part is the second half of this, where Sony says that its current “pillars” are dated and behind the competition. That may be referring to the fact that they do not have a set Game Pass alternative. And it also may refer to the idea that their biggest strength is one-off single player blockbuster games with no ongoing revenue. Premium, full priced, single player games are indeed Sony’s main pillar. They almost always review well, but their budgets are increasingly massive and the industry now continually demands ongoing revenue streams.
They go on to talk about something they call the “elusive perfect game subscription” where players want a free, best-in-class game, where subscriptions will not cover those costs. This is presumably referring to Microsoft’s blockbuster Game Pass launches, a platform Xbox still maintains is profitable, while Sony has previously said they believe such a model will be unsustainable. Which is also what they’re saying privately here, along with a “unified mobile, PC and console experience” that is impossible to make. They also believe Microsoft is making its own mobile store to compete with Apple and Google, which Sony will not have an answer for, and they can derive significant revenue from that now that they’ve purchased Candy Crush maker King.
There’s nothing specific about Sony’s live service plans within this one document (but who knows, as all 1.3 million docs haven’t been searched yet), but you can see the roots of why that plan existed in the first place, even if it seems to be going quite poorly now.
It is, of course, also a perfectly reasonable thing to write up your strengths and weaknesses and threats from competitors in a document like this. It’s just interesting to see what exactly Sony sees as those weaknesses, which include subscription models and single player tentpoles, both of which they believe will be further threatened by the Activision acquisition.
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