Microsoft, in a round about way, suggest they didn’t cancel Redfall for PlayStation

thesixthaxis.com:

Yesterday Arkane  director Harvey Smith talked to IGN France about the studio and mentioned what happened when Microsoft splashed the cash for Zenimax while they were creating Redfall.

“We got bought by Microsoft and that was a huge sea change. They said, ‘No PlayStation 5. Now we’re gonna do Game Pass, Xbox, and PC,” he said. “Support from Game Pass and have to worry about one less platform, one less complexity.”

That seems fairly clear and straight forward, and it’s obviously the thing Microsoft would do, they bought Zenimax to bolster their first party output.  Except there’s a small matter of multiple legal challenges to the acquisition of Activision by Microsoft, all of which centre around the argument that buy buying Activision and taking all their games exclusive, Sony would be at a disadvantage.

Publicly, Redfall has always been Xbox and PC exclusive so any chatter about a cancelled PS5 version would not be great for the ongoing legal cases. You won’t be surprised to learn then that  spokesperson for Microsoft has told IGN that the company has not “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,” said Microsoft.

Those would be the previously announced Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo. Cancelling them would have broke contracts they already had with Sony and cost Zenimax a fortune so not really a great argument there from Microsoft.

“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”, concludes the statement,

So there you go, Redfall on PlayStation