Sony is Worried Xbox Will Find Ways to Sabotage Call of Duty on PlayStation
Sony is worried that Microsoft could sabotage PlayStation versions of Call of Duty if Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard were to be approved.
As first reported by The Verge, Sony submitted documentation to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority saying that Microsoft could do a variety of moves to make the Call of Duty franchise on PlayStation unappealing to play on. This includes things such as raising the price of the games, prioritizing the development of the Xbox version, or releasing a buggy build of the games on PlayStation.
“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. 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,” Sony explained in the documents.
Sony continued, “Indeed, as Modern Warfare II attests, Call of Duty is most often purchased in just the first few weeks of release. If it became known that the game’s performance on PlayStation was worse than on Xbox, Call of Duty gamers could decide to switch to Xbox, for fear of playing their favorite game at a second-class or less competitive venue.”
Sony is positing that if the merger were to go through, Microsoft would have the incentive to allow Call of Duty to fail on PlayStation, as well as receive a higher revenue share for its content than if Activision was an independent entity. Additionally, Sony argues there would be no way for it, or the CMA, to monitor the quality of Call of Duty to ensure that the PlayStation version receives fair allocation of Microsoft's development resources.
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