French authorities support third-party accessory manufacturers. The Competition Authority has just announced a monumental penalty against Sony in an anti-competitive case. The Japanese manufacturer is found guilty of having profited from its monopoly on PlayStation 4 controllers for more than 4 years, and will therefore have to pay a fine of 13,527,000 euros. The discovery of the facts dates back to a referral from the Subsonic group, a French controller manufacturer, which allowed the Authority to identify two abusive practices aimed at: dissuade consumers from purchasing unofficial peripherals.
The deployment of deliberate bugs
The investigation conducted as part of this referral first revealed the implementation of deliberately harmful updates. Under the guise of combating counterfeiting, many patches applied since November 2015 have directly affected third-party controllers to make them more tedious to use. Untimely disconnections and other synchronization issues have encouraged the installation of doubts concerning the quality of these unofficial accessories. In this way, Sony was indirectly able to push players to buy controllers under the PlayStation label to overcome technical issues initially thought to be unintentional. However, this only concerned controllers that did not have the manufacturer's official license, the second major point noted by the Competition Authority.
An official partnership too complex to establish
Faced with technical countermeasures, many manufacturers then tried to approach Sony in order to obtain the holy grail: the famous official license, a true guarantee of quality. However, it seems that the company has done everything in its power to make the process as opaque as possible. The Authority reveals that access to the partnership program has been made impossible for certain competing companies.
To do this, the manufacturer has simply refused to communicate the access criteria, thus preventing the upgrade of third-party accessories to justify their eligibility. The Authority therefore considers that Sony has allowed itself to apply to competitors of its choice the countermeasures initially designed for counterfeit products. The Japanese company is therefore accused of having damaged the brand image of third-party manufacturers, by passing off their products as accessories with poor finishes.
Is this voluntary brake on the deployment of third-party accessories also in place on the PlayStation 5 ecosystem? The press release from the Competition Authority only refers to the monopoly applied to the PlayStation 4. But following these revelations, the glaring absence of unofficial PS5 controllers could however leave doubts as to a possible repetition of these practices. For the moment, nothing incriminates the manufacturer which has the merit of offering one of the most technologically advanced controllers on the market.
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