Does Sony pay developers to stay away from Game Pass?

A major draw point on the Xbox platform is the Game Pass All exclusive titles for Xbox One and the current Xbox Series X|S are free with the pass, and more titles are added every month. The Game Pass is even represented on the PC and with the Game Pass Ultimate you have the whole package on the computer and the consoles.

Microsoft now has one made an explosive claim. Sony is said to have paid developers money to stay away from Game Pass. According to the Microsoft report, Sony would thus want to hinder the growth of the competition.

Sony is said to limit the growth of Game Pass

“Microsoft’s ability to continue to grow Game Pass has been hampered by Sony’s desire to stem that growth,” according to a report Microsoft filed with the Brazilian competition authority on Aug. 9. “Sony pays for ‘blocking rights’ to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services.”

These claims are just one of a number of documents Microsoft has filed about the Review on Acquisition of Activision Blizzard submitted. At the beginning of the year it became known that Microsoft wants to incorporate the publisher and its studios for a sum of 68.7 billion US dollars.

Microsoft’s allegations follow Sony’s own claims that its acquisition of Activision Blizzard is the future could influence the player’s decisionwhether to buy an Xbox or PlayStation console. Microsoft has repeatedly emphasized that it intends to continue developing games for its own consoles as well as for other platforms.

With Microsoft’s claims, the question now is whether Sony is really intent on keeping games off Game Pass. Possibly the alleged “blocking rights” could be just one Paraphrase for an exclusive contract act.

It would also be interesting to know from the claims whether Sony is specifically targeting games in order to shield them from Microsoft’s subscription service and whether this could also have an impact on PC games.