PlayStation exclusive MLB: The Show coming to Xbox

Major League Baseball has announced that PlayStation exclusive MLB: The Show 21 will be coming to the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. It will release on April 20th (yes, the funny date), and be included free for Game Pass subscribers.

Now, this is a pretty big deal for those who follow the console wars. The Show is not only a PlayStation exclusive franchise, but a first party one to boot. Sony’s own San Diego Studio develops the popular, and indeed only, baseball title licensed by MLB. For the longest time, if you were a baseball fan and wanted to play with real teams and real players, you had to own a PlayStation. Now it seems the League has changed the terms of the agreement and has forced Sony to release it on Microsoft’s consoles.

An announcement had been made in December about getting multi-platform support for the game, but the news caught everyone a bit off guard. Especially the Game Pass release. While The Show is currently currently listed at $70 USD for the PS5, it’s now effectively free for Xbox fans. Game Pass costs $10 USD/month, or $120 for the year. So you don’t need to be a math wizard to see how much of a deal that is. Especially now that this greedy industry got their price hike on new releases. So far Sony has not announced whether they’ll be brining The Show 21 to PlayStation Now. Though they’d be stupid not to at this point.

Being forced to port their own game over to rival hardware must be a big slice of humble pie for Sony. They’re certainly stuck between a rock and hard place in the matter. While they own the game’s code, they don’t own its content. Should they refuse League demands, MLB could simply give the license out to another company. They don’t care who as long as they’re making profits. And EA or 2K could certainly develop a halfway decent baseball game. Aside from the highly aggressive monetization mechanics and lazy annual updates, Madden, FIFA, and NBA2K are still competent sports sims.

If Sony were to refuse and loose the license as a result, they could still make a baseball game called The Show. But there’s a reason why non-licensed sports games are rarely successful. Most of the draw for this genre is that people can play as their favourite players for their favourite teams. Nobody’s going to want to step up to the plate as the Toronto Blue Birds or the New York Snickerdoodles. So they have to comply if they want to keep control of the franchise.

With this news, the current console war is certainly getting interesting. Last summer, I had noted that neither platform seemed to have a guaranteed win on their hands. Now, Sony does have a lot of momentum coming off the phenomenal success of the PS4. However, this success has also made them a bit cocky. As such, they’ve been making a lot of little mistakes, gaffes, and tone deaf decisions lately. Not enough to do any significant damage to the brand, but enough that a small number of fans are starting to take notice. Microsoft meanwhile is in it to win it. They have to if they want to stay relevant in the video game market. So they’ve been making a lot of power plays lately, whenever they can see an opening to swoop in and steal a bit of Sony’s lunch.

If you look at sales figures for both consoles, the PS5 is certainly the clear winner here, outselling the Series by 2:1. However, much of this success has actually been in Europe. In the critical North American market, the gap is a much narrower 1.2:1. Of course it’s worth noting that sales numbers are still being impacted by CCPVirus related stock issues. The Switch also continues to absolutely dominate both consoles, outselling the PS5 by 2.8:1 in the Americas.

It’s tough to say if Xbox could pull ahead of PlayStation. But if they keep making the right decisions, and don’t antagonize their fanbase like Sony often likes to do, they can stand to make substantial gains.