Well nothing ever really impacts those who own everything. Us plebians (the vast majority) of gamers can't afford (either the money and/or the time investment) into owning every console + PC.

I have zero interest in CoD but I would love to see GT go to gamepass cross-play for the easy XBox competition. Bring it on :)

This whole gamepass on playstation thing is just a matter of price. Sony wants a big share, MS wants to give Sony the smallest share possible. So getting into a better bargaining position is key. The bigger price is to get xCloud on Sony tvs (and others as well ofcourse)

One could argue that if you have a PC, you wouldn't need every console anyway.  Really just a Switch alongside it would siffice, especially as more Sony games get PC releases.

And besides that, the question was to each individual poster...as in what I myself would want.  Am I not allowed to reply because I have all consoles nor express why it doesn't matter to me?

You absolutely are.

This is a very valid point that just seems to be lost on a lot of people. Particularly because nobody seems to addressing the strategy COD have been using to sell their games.

The success of COD has been bolstered massively in the past 2 years by the release of Warzone and the timing with Covid. It has seen a huge influx of even more casual gamers, who don't even normally buy COD annual releases, enter the space. 

For those who aren't playing the game, COD titles are tied to the Battle Royale. This is because they cleverly leverage Warzone to sell their new releases, by crossing over content from the mainline games into the Battle Royale and slowing down a players progress if they don't buy it.

Now this strategy could of course change, but if you remove mainline COD from Playstation, you cut off the Battle Royale. If you cut off the Battle Royale, you cut off millions of paying customers. If you cut off millions of players, you open the space wide open for a competitor to just walk right in. Leaving to door open for irreparable damage to the IP. 

I think this is perhaps the most important point though. The reason mainline COD games are intrinsically linked to Warzone, is because essentially COD has been competing with its own creation. They have 100 million players who download their free game, they need to try and draw the attention of that audience away from their existing game to pay for their new games. If you separate the two, or divide the audience in any capacity, you lose market share. 

Thinking about it again. Sony might offer some of their PC offerings to XBox Gamepass for PC.

The games released on PC, don't need extra development time like porting to Xbox consoles. But it would give MS something back.

The biggest value proposition for PlayStation as a brand from the start, in my opinion, was not the first party titles, but the fact that if you bought a PlayStation you got a “no compromise” experience.

If you bought other consoles, you knew you were going to miss out on something. Nintendo always lacked western third party support, and Xbox always lacked Japanese support, particularly from the AA and A space. PlayStation was the one console that had basically everything besides niche PC genres like RTS.

2023 will be the first time in the brand’s history that if you choose PlayStation, you are actually losing a large portion of the industry. If you are an FPS fan, if you are an RPG fan, if you are a western MMO fan, if you are a car game fan, if you are a family friendly game fan, if you want to play games portably, if you want any of the above, PlayStation is simply a bad choice now. On top of that, it will be the most expensive platform to be on for long term cost of ownership.


I think internally at Sony they would gladly trade one or two of their first party franchises to keep call of duty

This.

I personally don't give a crap about COD. I only played about one or two of them for an hour or so back in the 360 days. But I understand millions of people play COD, and it would be nice to still have it on PlayStation in perpetuity instead of restricting it to Xbox and Windows. 

The Spider-Man series feels like one of the least PlayStation iconic franchises in the sense that it's based on a comic character created in the 60s who has had a ton of incarnations over the years. It would be nice for the Spider-Man game franchise to come to Xbox and Windows. Spider-Man is a massive crowd-pleaser, and it wouldn't be near as crazy as putting God of War or Uncharted on Xbox. 

Sony did already give Microsoft its baseball game.

This was not their choice though, the MLB told them to launch the game on Xbox or they would lose the MLB license