Earlier this week, Arkane director Harvey Smith claimed that the upcoming vampire shooter Redfall was originally going to release on PS5 as well as Xbox until Microsoft put a stop to it after the studio's acquisition. Smith claims that Arkane were told "No PS5" and that the team were now "focusing on Xbox, PC, and the Game Pass."
Just as you might expect, these comments riled up quite a few people, with many bringing up Phil Spencer's recent comments about acquisitions not being a case of taking games away from other platforms. Microsoft has now responded to these criticisms in a statement sent to Gamespot, insisting that it has never "pulled any games from PlayStation", instead claiming it's done the opposite by launching both Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo on PS5 first.
"We haven't pulled any games from PlayStation," reads the statement from an Xbox spokesperson. "In fact, we've expanded our footprint of games that we've shipped on Sony's PlayStation since our acquisition of ZeniMax, and the first two games we shipped after closing were PlayStation 5 exclusives."
Microsoft also brings up Minecraft and Mojang which it acquired back in 2014, using the fact that Minecraft and subsequent games like Minecraft Dungeons and the upcoming Minecraft Legends are all still available on PlayStation consoles and have never been pulled.
While I suppose it's technically accurate for Microsoft to say it's never pulled a game from PlayStation consoles, the statement slightly skirts around the issue with Redfall. A game needs to be released on storefronts for it to be pulled, and it's true that existing Bethesda/Arkane titles are still available on PlayStation. However, the claim is that Microsoft cancelled a PS5 version of Redfall while it was early in development, something which is a little different to simply pulling an existing title.
In any case, the whole debacle isn't a good look for a company that is desperately trying to convince regulators that it won't withhold titles like Call of Duty from PlayStation consoles to try and push its acquisition of Activision Blizzard over the line. It definitely won't help, at the very least.