An anonymous source from Microsoft Games Studios reports that upper management at the company is “in total panic” over recent events involving their longtime competitor and primary industry rival, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and their inability to compete with Sony’s cutting-edge end-of-business strategies. The industry titans have been neck-in-neck for nearly two decades, each attempting to outperform the other in seeing who can crash the vidcon indstry the fastest.
“We really thought we had them at E3 2013,” Bill Stencer, Whistleblower at Microsoft’s vidcon division, told Brain Slop in an anonymous interview last monday at approximately 2:14 PM during his lunch break.
“We knew they were announcing they were going to start price gouging their customers for online play and take away our only edge, and we had an absurd price-point and used game policy to one-up them. We were celebrating at our offices when they blundered and garnered support of the entire gaming industry with their hilarious sketches about game sharing. We didn’t realize they were playing the long game the whole time. You really don’t expect that kind of behavior from the people responsible for the Playstation 3.”
Microsoft reportedly thought that they were well in the lead for crashing the industry, but Sony seized the opportunity to take over the western gaming industry and convince their parent company to move the gaming division’s HQ to California. There they implemented subtle use of anti-Japanese xenophobia and profit-mongering to quickly achieve a goal Microsoft had been attempting with the Halo series for some time - disenfranchising their core userbase. “By the time they’d started shifting to more obvious and aggressive tactics like their Japanese-game-exclusive censorship policy and abolishment of games with a less than 1:1 custcene-to-gameplay ratio, it was already too late. We’d sacrificed too much of our hold on the industry with the Xbox One, we had no leverage to sh*t on the gaming community even half as efficiently as Sony.”
The eighth generation wasn’t the end of Microsoft’s woes, however. “We really thought we had them in the last few years,” Bill stated. “We spent billions of dollars acquiring Bethesda when they were in the middle of making two games horribly unsuited for their usual style, immediately after massive restructuring drastically changed the way they developed games - honestly, I thought we might have been tipping our hand with that one. Even a fool would know that was a terrible business decision.”
“But our real ace in the hole was the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. We really thought that was sure fire - acquiring an ailing publisher right as its executives were deploying their parachutes, in the midst of sexual assault allegations and other legal troubles, with Overwatch on its deathbed. We even had our merger delayed by antitrust lawsuits - how can you beat that?” Microsoft spent nearly $70 billion on its acquisition of the vidcon industry’s Satan, Activision-Blizzard, in early 2022.
“Then Sony announced their own d*mn acquisition! Our own sloppy seconds, are you kidding me? We didn’t even remember they were still in business until the announcement happened, and we were buying the people who owned Destiny!” Bill said, speaking of Sony’s acquisition of Bungie in mid-2022. “Then they start killing franchises left and right like the second coming of EA, and now they’ve one-upped the utter embarrassment of Overwatch 2 with this whole Concord debacle. I tell you man, we really sh*t the bed on this whole arms race. Sony’s making us look downright competent by comparison.”
Our interviewer asked Bill if Sony’s attempts to kill the Playstation Vita should have alerted them to Sony’s subtle business tactics. “To be honest, I didn’t even remember the Vita existed until you just mentioned it,” Bill said. “I wouldn’t put that kind of thing past those sly raccoons at Sony, but to be frank, I don’t think they remembered it existed either.”