Redaction errors reveal the economics of exclusivity | Opinion

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We always knew that the court hearings around the FTC’s challenge to Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard would reveal some interesting details, but we got rather more details than anyone had bargained for this week – courtesy of someone with a Sharpie marker who is presumably having a very, very bad few days at work.

Documents from both Sony and Microsoft which were meant to have key details censored before being entered into the court records were clumsily redacted with a marker, leaving the figures quite legible on the court’s scanned versions of the documents. It’s not clear who was actually at fault here – there was some guffawing in Sony’s direction when its badly redacted documents emerged, but then Microsoft was hit by the same problem, raising the possibility that both companies’ details had leaked due to errors by a third party.

Either way, the insight we got into various parts of the two companies’ businesses were very interesting – from the size of Microsoft’s Azure cloud business to the fact that Sony estimates that there are around a million PlayStation owners who never play any game except Call of Duty.

Perhaps the leak that has provoked most interest and surprise among consumer audiences, though, is the confirmation of the development budgets for Sony’s major first-party titles, with both Horizon: Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part 2 confirmed to have cost more than $200 million to develop.

Exclusivity is currently the best way for companies to maximise income from actual sales of the game without relying on post-launch revenue to make back its costs

To some degree, the surprise people outside the industry feel