The eternal dispute between Microsoft e Sony regarding the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard continues, despite the recent announcement that Call of Duty titles can launch on Playstation Plus, e Microsoft offering Sony a 10-year deal to continue bringing the series to Playstation consoles.
After The Verge has analyzed the submitted documents to the Anglo-Saxon Antitrust (CMA)where Sony’s fear of a boycott by Microsoft in the optimization of Call of Duty titles is evident, as stated below:
“Microsoft may release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where bugs and errors only surface at the final level of the game or after subsequent updates. Even if such degradations could be detected quickly, any remedy would likely have come too late, by which point the gaming community would have lost faith in PlayStation as the go-to place to play CoD. Indeed, as Modern Warfare II attests, CoD is often purchased only in the first few weeks of release. If game performance on PlayStation was known to be worse than on Xbox, Call of Duty players might decide to switch to Xbox, for fear of playing their favorite game in a second-rate or less competitive venue.”
In response to the tweet by Tom Warrenwhich contains the words above, Lulu Cheng MeserveyEVP of corporate affairs and CCO at Activision-Blizzard, says that Microsoft is offering Sony another 10-year deal with better terms compared to what was offered by the publisher Activision in the previous agreement which, we recall, is about to expire in 2024. But the real question to ask is why Sony continues to reject the proposed agreements. According to Meservey, the CEO Jim Ryan di Sony Interactive Entertainmentwould have answered this question on 21 February in Brussels by stating that:
“I don’t want a new deal with Call of Duty. I just want to block your union.”
The European Commission had postponed the decision on the acquisition until the end of April, but recently it emerged that they are close to approving the union, without Microsoft having to sell any assets from Activision-Blizzard. In the meantime, it remains to know the decisions of the CMA he was born in Federal Trade Commission in the United States. Obviously we will keep you updated on any news.
The CEO of SIE answered that question in Brussels.
In his words:
“I don’t want a new Call of Duty deal. I just want to block your merger.”
— Lulu Cheng Meservey (@lulumeservey) March 8, 2023
