Just as Sony and Microsoft continue to fight over the latter Proposed $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzardmore and more people – relatively powerful and influential people – are drawn into the debate.
One of those people is Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell (representing Washington State), who earlier today raised the specter of Sony’s monopoly on the “high-end gaming market” and told US Trade Representatives It even went so far as to call for discussions on the issue with Japan as part of ongoing digital trade negotiations.
During a Senate Finance Committee hearing on “The President’s 2023 Trade Policy Agenda,” Cantwell, among many other international trade talks, said: The Japanese government allowed Sony to engage in blatant anti-competitive behavior through exclusive deals and payments to the game’s publishers, and he established one of Japan’s most popular games. . “
i’m going to pretend she’s talking Final Fantasy There.
She accused Japan’s Federal Trade Commission of failing to investigate this “exclusionary practice,” and called on Katherine Tai, the US Trade Representative, to “address these issues and create a level playing field.” What do you think you can do about it?”
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In response, Tai said that while discussions are currently taking place between the U.S. and Japanese governments regarding the digital economy, “This is new to me, but let me take this back. You and your I am happy to follow up with the team.” ”.
Aside from turning this from a video game industry topic to one of international trade and diplomatic relations, it’s wild to see Cantwell casually document this. Similarly, we all know that politicians cannot be experts in everything they talk about. The video game market knows this is really weird.
She refers to the Japanese market with a statistic of “98% of the high-end game market.” very carefully selected (Last year, by the U.S. own FTC) is to exclude PC, Nintendo and mobile games, in this case pitting the supposedly exclusive PlayStation against the underdog Xbox (which is true) in Japan, Microsoft has been free for over 20 years and is a fairly failing market). As in 1992, the Japanese government realized that the video game market was bigger and more complex than pitting two consoles against each other.
On a global scale, Sony doesn’t even have a 98% share of the world market. god of war market series they own, because Steam captures 30% of all sales on PC. Everyone from Epic to Microsoft (both American companies) distributes “exclusive deals and payments to game publishers.” all the timeAnd if she wants to talk about exclusives, the latest Steam stats for PC show that 96% of the platform’s install base uses Windows.
It is very strange that there are so many realistic and credible ways to criticize Sony’s opposition to the deal that it has settled on highly inaccurate statistics and a direct attack on the Japanese government. Over the course of her political career, Cantwells largest individual Contributor of election funds in the meantime microsoft employee .
