Sony’s “Anti-Competitive Conduct” Around FF16 Is Questioned By A US Senator

gameranx.com:

Sony may truly be regretting their actions in light of the Microsoft – Activision deal, as the spotlight has now come on to them on the subject of video game exclusives.

Washington’s junior senator Maria Cantwell has spoken about Sony’s anti-competitive conduct in the video game industry, in a Senate Finance Committee hearing. As reported by PoliticoPro, she had this to say:

“I’m told that Sony controls a monopoly of 98% of the high-end game market, yet Japan’s government has allowed Sony to engage in blatant anti-competitive conduct through exclusive deals and payments to game publishers.”

Senator Cantwell also stated that Japan’s Fair Trade Commission was not doing their job investigating Sony’s actions and pressed U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai what she would do to address these issues.

Does all this sound serious? That’s because it absolutely is. The last time a US senator drew their attention to the video game industry, the industry established the ESRB, so that the government would not form a regulatory body themselves.

Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach mentions that this issue had to do about Final Fantasy 16 being a PlayStation 5 exclusive. But then that raises the question, where did Senator Cantwell even hear about all of this?

The answer is she read Curt Levey, a conservative attorney and president of the Committee for Justice. Curt had written on RealClearMarkets an article titled: Japan Colludes With Antitrust Regulators Against MSFT.

To paraphrase Levey, he accused Sony of regularly violating Japan antitrust laws while the JFTC looks the other way. He points out that Sony incentivizes game publishers not to bring their games to Xbox, and this has allowed PlayStation to control 95 % of the Japanese market