• The latest revelation from the FTC vs. Microsoft hearings shows just how much PlayStation spent on the development of some of its exclusive gaming titles.
• The information was gleaned from poorly redacted court documents that have since been removed from public view.
• PlayStation spent as much as $212 million over the course of five years to make Horizon Forbidden West.

The revelations continue coming to the fore as the FTC vs. Microsoft hearings pick up the pace. The latest involves PlayStation once again, as now we know how much the company spent on developing and publishing a handful of its recent exclusives, along with precisely how many Call of Duty players make use of its consoles.

The information was gleaned from some poorly redacted court documents, with a black permanent marker (Sharpie) used to obfuscate any information that PlayStation did not want to be publicly shared.

Unfortunately, however, said documents, which you can see screenshots of courtesy of The Verge here, could be brightened with imaging software in order to see precisely what was blacked out.

The documents, which the courts have since removed from public access, were already downloaded by fast-acting journalists and Microsoft’s team, showcasing that Sony spent as much as $212 million on the development of Horizon Forbidden West over the course of five years, with 300 employees involved on the game’s eventual release in early 2022.

One of the other exclusives mentioned was the divisive The Last of Us Part II, which reportedly cost $220 million to make and employed roughly 200 people.

As mentioned, along with some figures around exclusives, the documents detailed how many Call of Duty players make use of PlayStation consoles. To that end, in 2021 Sony says as many as 14 million players booted up a CoD game 30 percent of the time, with an estimated one million playing a CoD game 100 percent of the time.

The document also suggests that CoD was responsible for as much as $800 million of PlayStation revenue in the United States in 2021, with the global figure rising to approximately $1.5 billion that year.

With Sony pushing the agenda that any impact on its access to the CoD franchise proves detrimental to its business, these figures seem to support the claims, even if PlayStation head Jim Ryan’s internal emails tell a different story.

Either way, the revelations surfacing as a result of these hearings have made Microsoft’s desire to acquire Activision Blizzard even more complicated, which will make the judge’s role in all this all the more interesting. This is therefore far from the final revelation that we see from the hearings.

[Image – Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash]