Among the best games ever made for the Transformers franchise are, without a doubt, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron and Transformers: War for Cybertron. The company that created the Transformers franchise, Hasbro, desired that they be made available on all platforms through Game Pass.
However, Hasbro accused Activision of losing the hard drives containing the game, which led to a massive PR battle that echoed throughout 2023. Activision has published the following Transformers in the past- Transformers: War for Cybertron, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Transformers: Devastation, Transformers: The Game, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark.
Hasbro made a controversial comment on Activision’s functioning
Hasbro wanted to re-release several Transformers titles on Xbox X/S via Xbox’s backward compatibility, but their plans were put to rest due to an error on Activision’s part. During an interview, when a Hasbro executive was asked about the future of Transformers games and his desire to reintroduce them to the world via Game Pass, he responded:
Sadly, apparently Activision’s not sure what hard drives they’re on in their building. When a company eats a company that eats a company things get lost, and that’s very frustrating.
Hope is that now that the deal is moving forward with Microsoft and Xbox that they’ll go through all of the archives and every hard drive to find it all, because it’s an easy Game Pass add. We want those games back up for people to have a chance to play.
However, Microsoft emerged victorious in the legal battle concerning Activision’s acquisition, which gave hope to the speedy recovery of game titles for their release on Game Pass.
Transformers: Fall of Cybertron and Transformers: War for Cybertron managed to stand out among the crowd of all the other Transformers games solely because of their deep third-person shooter gameplay and close connection with the Transformers origin story.
Hasbro was speedy in taking back their harsh comments
After acknowledging their mistake in criticizing Activision for losing the game, Hasbro later issued an apology to Activision for their misstatement.
While clarifying their previous statement concerning Activision, they said:
To clarify, comments that suggest TRANSFORMERS games have been lost were made in error. We apologize to Activision and regret any confusion; they’ve been great partners, and we look forward to future opportunities to work together.
After making her critical remarks about the Activision and Microsoft merger public, Activision executive Lulu Cheng Meservey followed up with a statement. Clarifying Activision’s side of the story, she said:
These headlines are wrong. We have the code, it’s not lost and never was.
Hasbro eventually realized their mistake and owned up to their error in defaming Activision. Nevertheless, even the Microsoft and Activision merger has not been able to bring the beloved Transformers titles back to game pass or on new age consoles like Xbox X/S, and the future for these titles looks meek.
Numerous Activision-published Transformers games have disappeared from stores since 2017, and according to IGN’s report, the publisher’s license for the franchise has expired. The games are no longer available anywhere except for second-hand markets, which are taking advantage of the novelty by raising the prices for these games.
