Is Sony starting to lose the plot? (pic: Activision)
The question of whether Activision Blizzard should be acquired by Xbox has entered the realm of conspiracy theory as Sony begin to lose their grip.
Although most people will likely be for or against Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard depending on which format they favour, Xbox or PlayStation, both companies have made valid points to defend their position.
They’ve also both stretched the truth, and counted on monopoly investigators not properly understanding the games industry, but it’s only now that Sony has started to get a bit silly, with an accusation that Microsoft might purposefully sabotage Call Of Duty on PlayStation 5.
‘Microsoft might release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where bugs and errors emerge only on the game’s final level or after later updates,’ says a Sony statement – written, we can only assume, with tongue firmly in cheek.
‘Even if such degradations could be swiftly detected, any remedy would likely come too late, by which time the gaming community would have lost confidence in PlayStation as a go-to venue to play Call Of Duty,’ adds the statement.
That does seem ludicrous, not to mention paranoid, but it’s used as a specific example of what Microsoft could do to handicap Sony without breaking the terms of their proposed 10 year multiformat deal.
The suggestion seems silly – because it would be so obvious to everyone that that’s what Microsoft was doing – but the other concerns are more reasonable.
Sony suggest that Microsoft could raise the price of Call Of Duty on PlayStation but not Xbox, purposefully make the quality and performance worse, not maintain the online properly, and make Game Pass the only subscription service for Call Of Duty.
Microsoft has already said that Call Of Duty can be on PlayStation Plus (and GeForce Now), but Sony’s counter to that is that they’d charge so much it wouldn’t be cost effective.
These other suggestions would be underhand but not outside the realms of possibility, with Sony suggesting that, ‘Post-Transaction, Microsoft will need to make choices about the support it will provide to develop any PlayStation version of Call Of Duty. Even if Microsoft operated in good faith, it would be incentivised to support and prioritise development of the Xbox version of the game.’
This is all beginning to make Sony seem more petty and unreasonable, just as monopoly investigators appear to be accepting that Microsoft has made enough concessions, with the EU expected to okay the deal in April.
It’s still unclear what the current position of US regulators will be, but it’s seeming increasingly unlikely that the deal will be prevented entirely.
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The question of whether Activision Blizzard should be acquired by Xbox has entered the realm of conspiracy theory as Sony begin to lose their grip.