Purchase Activision-Blizzard according to microsoft The presence of the first titles on PlayStation consoles left a lot up in the air. Sony is obviously aware of this and has not hesitated to criticize the operation carried out by the Redmond giant on several occasions.
Following an agreement between Activision-Blizzard and Microsoft, the latter, proposed to Sony that future installments of Call of Duty also appear on PlayStation for the next three years. However, Jim Ryan, CEO of PlayStation, responded to the said suggestion by saying that “after nearly 20 years of Call of Duty on PlayStation, his the proposal was inadequate on many levels and didn’t consider the impact on our players“.
If the operation is completed, Activision-Blizzard would become part of Microsoft and from then on would only be able to publish on platforms that its parent company allows. Seeing Microsoft compete with Sony in consoles and services through streamingit’s clear that the Redmond giant is looking to bolster its catalog of exclusive video games against the competition.
As we said, Sony didn’t bother to hide its disgust, so Microsoft decided to come forward and accuse the Japanese company of hypocrisy over the deals it made to acquire titles like Deathloop, Ghostwire Tokyo, and the Final Fantasy VII remake that weren’t released for Xbox. The acquisitions of Bungie and Savage Game Studios can be added to these moves.
In addition to public criticism of the Activision-Blizzard deal and Microsoft’s Call of Duty deal, Sony is maneuvering in front of various regulators like a spring to prevent the acquisition process from being completed. Here we can highlight the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), whose Phase 1 investigation concluded that the deal between Activision-Blizzard and the Redmond giant could “harm rivals”, especially Sony. If we say that CMA was the first to torpedo NVIDIA’s purchase of ARM, one might think that Microsoft has clearly hit a major roadblock.
We remember that Microsoft reached an agreement to take over Activision-Blizzard in exchange for paying about 68.7 billion dollars. If the operation is allowed, we would be talking about a second video game giant that would become the property of Microsoft, which took over Zenimax in 2020 in exchange for some 7,500 million dollars.
Regardless of who started it, the fact that Sony and Microsoft are reinforcing each other by compromising or buying third parties hurts consumers not only because the exclusivity of one deprives the other of titles, but because it lays the groundwork for a duopoly that could prevent others from competitors participating in the race. In fact, in these debates, many forget about Nintendo, which managed to restore the “hardcore” part of the public with the Switch, which turned its back on it a decade and a half ago.
