In the midst of the ongoing battle to get its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard approved by Brazil, Microsoft has accused Sony of paying for “blocking rights” to prevent developers from adding their games to Xbox Game Pass.
The company filed a claim to the South American country’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) on Tuesday, commenting that Sony has been actively trying to inhibit the growth of Game Pass by keeping certain games from appearing on Microsoft’s game-streaming service. In the claim, Microsoft says Sony is paying developers to keep their games out of Game Pass out of exclusivity fears. In other words, it’s concerned that some of the Activision Blizzard games that are on PlayStation Plus, like games in the Call of Duty series, may become a Game Pass exclusive once the deal closes — a concern that Microsoft deems incoherent.
“Considering that exclusivity strategies have been at the heart of Sony’s strategy to strengthen the company’s presence in the games industry and that Sony is a leader in the distribution of digital games, Sony’s concern with any exclusivity of Activision’s content is inconsistent — to say the least,” Microsoft said in the document, as roughly translated from Portuguese. “Microsoft’s ability to continue expanding Game Pass has been hampered by Sony’s desire to inhibit such growth. Sony pays for ‘blocking rights’ to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services.”
Earlier this month, Sony said that Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and by extension the Call of Duty franchise, would sway players to pick Xbox over PlayStation. Microsoft reiterated more than once that Call of Duty, as well as other games in Activision Blizzard’s portfolio, will remain multiplatform even after the deal closes at the end of this fiscal year.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”