Microsoft's announcement of agreeing to buy Activision-Blizzard in a €68 billion deal has shaken the gaming industry, with many wondering what will happen once the deal closes.
This means that brands like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, and True Crime: Streets of LA will be owned by Microsoft, along with other brands like DOOM, Elder Scrolls, Halo, and more.
But that raises the issue of Sony's position in this area. With a rumored service called Project Spartacus offering titles from its nearly 30-year-old catalog, there will be franchises, like Crash Bandicoot, that will need more talk to use the service.
However, it's also representative of how far Sony has come from the big news from Microsoft and what that could mean for future generations of consoles and games in general.
A Sony and Microsoft deal?
When the Nintendo Online Expansion Pack service was announced in October, Nintendo surprised many by confirming that Microsoft-owned Banjo Kazooie was about to hit the service, now available to play on Switch.
In hindsight, this came as no surprise, mainly due to main characters Banjo and Kazooie appearing in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as paid DLC back in 2019.
Plus, watching the first game in the series, on Nintendo's online service with a "from Xbox Game Studios," will make anyone over the age of 20 gawk. Especially with the Rare logo that appears once you boot up the game, but it shows just how far some brands have come since they were first released on other systems.
However, Sony is already in the back. It didn't help when CEO Jim Ryan publicly called his old catalog "dated" and questioned why anyone would want to reproduce it, a comment Ryan has apparently walked away from since.
Throwing away 25+ years of games wouldn't put anyone in a good position, especially the CEO of Sony. But Project Spartacus is looking to reverse some of that ill will, rumored to include games from the PS1 and PS2 era.
While I don't expect Onimusha 2 or Rosco McQueen to appear on the service, at least to begin with, seeing games like Ridge Racer and Tomb Raider 2 ready to play on a PlayStation 5 is very appealing.
But we've been here before. Back in 2015, Sony allowed PS2 Classics to run on PlayStation 4, where you could play Ape Escape 2, Resident Evil 4, and pretty much Rockstar Games' entire library of PS2 releases.
Users hoped this meant that games you could play on PS3, PSP, and PS Vita would eventually work on PlayStation 4, but it didn't. The show collapsed after 18 months, and while you can play it on your PlayStation 5, it's far from meeting the demand out there.
But it also comes down to who owns the rights. Sony may have another battle soon, to deliver the original Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon games, now that they're about to be owned by Microsoft. These were once exclusive to Sony, at least at the height of their original releases. We can see something similar to the deal that Microsoft and Nintendo had for Banjo to appear on the Switch Online service.
But time will tell. Nostalgia is a powerful asset in gaming, now more than ever. It brings back memories and good feelings of a time when you enjoyed a game for what it was when it was released, not what it could be, whether through DLC content or multiplayer season packs.
After so many years in which Sony steadfastly refused to honor the past that many still hold high, Project Spartacus needs to impress from day one and not repeat the same tropes as its PS2 Classics series on PS4.