US Senator claims Sony has a 98 percent monopoly

A comment by a US senator about Sony’s alleged absolute market power in the Japanese video game sector caused irritation, not only in the gamer scene. “I’ve heard that Sony controls a monopoly of 98 percent of the high-end gaming market,” Senator Maria Cantwell said at a US Senate Finance Committee hearing.

Distortion of competition through exclusive contracts – “Final Fantasy 16” as a point of contention?

Despite Sony’s allegedly gigantic dominance, the Japanese government has allowed the company “to behave in a blatantly anti-competitive manner through exclusive contracts and payments to game publishers and to establish games that are among the most popular in Japan,” the democrat continued.

Cantwell, who represents the US state of Washington in the Senate, did not name a specific case, but it can be assumed that she meant “Final Fantasy 16”, among other things. The game is scheduled to be released exclusively for the Playstation 5 this summer.

Cantwell accuses the Japanese competition authority of not having sanctioned this “competitive behavior” by Sony. Addressing US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, she asked, “What do you think we can do to address these issues and create a level playing field?”

This fact was apparently new to Tai. But she promised to raise the issue in the digital economy talks currently underway between the US and Japan.

A user had Cantwell’s statement, which was reported by Politico, among others, in the gaming forum Resetera posted. This is how it got into the scene, where it caused ridicule. Sony’s monopoly position of 98 percent is to be doubted. After all, there is also Nintendo as a big player.

The Federal Trade Commission has months ago constructed a market category of “high-performance consoles”. Cantwell probably alluded to this with their “high-end games market”. Here, Nintendo has been taken out of the equation, so the result is actually a Playstation monopoly.

Then it’s Playstation versus Xbox, and the console from the American company Microsoft was never able to establish itself on the domestic market. The US authority responsible for monopolies and consumer protection does not include PCs and other gaming platforms in this “high-end gaming market”.

Behind Maria Cantwell’s step is a dispute that has occupied the tech world for a long time: the debate about the planned takeover of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft. Sony sees the plans critically and argues the same way as the US Senator is now against the Japanese group.

Sony fears that Microsoft could make Activision Blizzard games exclusive to the Xbox. Although Microsoft claims to keep games like “Call of Duty” available for Sony and Nintendo, there are doubts in the industry.