Sony accidentally revealed confidential PlayStation information and its Call of Duty revenue by redacting a court document with a Sharpie, revealed after a scan
Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake.
The Verge
Context & Ripple Effects
The disclosure surfaced amid a high-stakes dispute over Call of Duty, after Microsoft’s FTC response had already drawn attention for its limited detail on the franchise’s history and Activision’s finances Microsoft's earlier FTC filing on Call of Duty. Sony’s newly exposed PlayStation figures give that debate a more concrete commercial reference point.
It also extends Sony’s long record of sensitive material becoming public, from the financial cost of the Sony studio hack to later publication of Sony Pictures documents in a large document cache. Here, however, the failure was in document handling rather than an alleged intrusion.
First-order effects
Sony’s confidential PlayStation and Call of Duty revenue information became publicly accessible, reducing its control over commercially sensitive data in an active court process.
Microsoft, regulators, and other parties following the dispute can assess Sony’s stated exposure to Call of Duty using figures Sony intended to conceal.
Second-order effects
The figures can sharpen arguments over whether Call of Duty access or exclusivity materially affects PlayStation’s business, raising the evidentiary stakes for both Sony and Microsoft.
The episode pressures litigants and courts to tighten redaction review, particularly for scanned filings where visual masking may not remove underlying text.
Third-order effects
If high-profile competition cases continue to expose internal platform economics, antitrust disputes may become a recurring source of market intelligence that companies would not otherwise disclose.
The broader shift is toward more rigorous information-governance controls around legal discovery, as accidental disclosure can alter negotiating leverage as much as a formal filing does.
The trend: This is one data point in the growing collision between platform competition litigation and the need to protect closely held operating data.
redaction is hard and every redaction method has its challenges and people and organizations with a lot on the line mess it up constantly — most of the examples we're aware of involve electronic redaction though. this one is definitely going on an index card in our brain for w…
the court just gave up and deleted all of the submitted evidence for FTC v. Microsoft that was made public with redacted parts. I'm sure Sony isn't happy with whoever was responsible for not redacting info properly https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/... [image]
I'd need a tenth of that to fund 20-30 incredible indie games by super cool devs around the world. Not to say these games shouldn't get those budgets - they're super cool games - but gosh I wish someone would also take these bets on indie devs elsewhere https://www.ign.com/...
🤯 Call of Duty has global revenues of $1.5 billion. PlayStation users who play Call of Duty spent $15.9 billion on the platform between 2019 to 2021. Sony says 1 million PlayStation gamers play nothing but Call of Duty. https://www.theverge.com/...
Any law firm filing sharpie-redacted documents in the year 2023 deserves to lose every single client and should be forced to complete 400 mandatory CLE hours on how to use technogy made after like 2006. https://twitter.com/...
Sony just spilled confidential PlayStation information because of a Sharpie. Sony supplied a doc that was redacted with a Sharpie and a scanner caught secrets like huge Call of Duty revenues and that The Last of Us Part II costing $220 million. Details: https://www.theverge.com/.…
Sony wasn't the only one that had a document issues. Microsoft's Xbox document about acquisition targets (hello Bungie and Sega) was supposed to be redacted. The new version looks like this. Oops https://www.theverge.com/... [image]