Microsoft says it hasn't "pulled any games from PlayStation" despite Redfall director's claim of abandoned PS5 plans

gamesradar.com:

Microsoft says it "hasn't pulled any games from PlayStation," shortly after Arkane's Harvey Smith revealed that a Redfall PS5 version was in development before Xbox purchased the studio and canceled it.

In case you missed it, Smith said recently that Redfall was originally in development for PS5 alongside Xbox Series X/S and PC, but that the PlayStation version was canceled as Microsoft was keen on "focusing on Xbox, PC, and the Game Pass."

Now, in an impressively vague non-statement shared to GameSpot (opens in new tab), Microsoft has responded to Smith's words without directly refuting them.

"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," said a Microsoft spokesperson, referring to Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo. 

The spokesperson goes on to point out that Minecraft, which Xbox owns, has expanded to other platforms and that "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."

That's true, but the statement skirts around the topic of ditching plans for a PlayStation release before the game's launch, which seems to be what happened with Redfall. Of course, Xbox has been clear from the beginning that its Bethesda buyout was "about delivering great exclusive games on platforms where Game Pass exists," so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that one of its first orders of business was to take Redfall from PS5. After all, there was once a time when Starfield might've launched on PS5,