Near the beginning of The Game Awards, Geoff Keighley highlighted some major attendees like Nintendo's former president Reggie Files-Aime and current president Doug Bowser, as well as Head of Xbox Phil Spencer. Sony was notably absent in these remarks. Throughout the course of the night, several Sony games like God of War Ragnarok won major awards, while games like Death Stranding 2 and Horizon Forbidden West had their place at The Game Awards, too. Notably absent were major Xbox game announcements. The flip-flop is more than a little ironic.
Some who are perhaps too involved in console war mentality have diminished this to Xbox having no games to show, but that's not true. Redfall and Starfield are set to release within the first half of 2023, and there are several IPs in development that fans would have loved to see. The real reason Xbox skipped showing new trailers may have been revealed in the weeks leading up to the showcase.
Xbox Skips The Game Awards 2022
According to Jez Corden, there were "vague rumors" ahead of the showcase that Xbox may not show its games at The Game Awards. It's clear now that these rumors were, in all likelihood, correct. The reasoning is pretty simple: with increased scrutiny of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard King acquisition, Xbox did not want to give regulators more ammunition against it.
This seemingly lined up well too, given the FTC announced its lawsuit to block the Microsoft-Activsion Blizzard King merger today too. Chief among those complaints, aside from Call of Duty, is how Microsoft has treated its acquisition of Bethesda and IP like Redfall and Starfield. It should be noted that Microsoft has been willing to make concessions and announced pledges to keep Call of Duty on Sony, Nintendo, and Valve platforms for ten years, pending Sony's acceptance of such a legally-binding pledge of course.
The situation is a long and apparently dirty road, and it remains to be seen how this pending acquisition will impact players negatively in the short term. Missing out on major events like this because of the acquisition is certainly a negative; however, it's not something that's purely on Microsoft's end. One can argue that both Sony and Microsoft are posturing, but just as Microsoft may be considered rumored to skip the show because of the acquisition, Sony is rumored to have canceled its PlayStation Showcase this year to avoid having its arguments against Microsoft scrutinized.
Sony has also reportedly called Microsoft's 10-year Call of Duty deal "smoke and mirrors," while Microsoft has implied how disingenuous some regulators and Sony have been throughout this whole ordeal. And that's not taking into account whatever is happening behind closed doors. The sad part in all of this is, at The Game Awards 2018, representatives of Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all took the stage together. Four years later, it's as fragmented as it's ever been.
Regulators are looking into the long-term impacts on competition, rivalry, consumer market, and more with this acquisition, and both sides are arguing their points saying it's either good or bad for gamers. What's clear, though, is that the longer the companies avoid sitting down at the table and coming to a resolution, however that looks in business terms, the worse it is for gamers in the short term. And that short-term becomes much longer term the more time this takes.