Sony's latest volley against the Activision Blizzard acquisition: What if Microsoft straight-up sabotages COD?

pcgamer.com:

Sony is throwing pretty much everything at the wall in its unending quest to torpedo Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard, but a recent filing to the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) might be the most fearful the company has sounded since the acquisition was announced. In this week's lengthy statement to the CMA(opens in new tab), spotted by the Verge(opens in new tab), Sony asks regulators to consider one thing: What if Microsoft outright sabotaged COD on PlayStation?

The PlayStation maker asks the CMA to imagine a scenario in which «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.» Because «Call of Duty is most often purchased in just the first few weeks of release,» Sony says it wouldn't even matter if «such degradations could be swiftly detected» and fixed: Fickle players would already have «lost confidence in PlayStation as a go-to venue to play Call of Duty,» and maybe, unthinkably, switched over to Xbox.

Sony says you can't take Microsoft's recent contract spree—which has seen the company commit to bringing COD to Nintendo and Nvidia platforms(opens in new tab) for at least ten years if the Activision acquisition goes through—as a sign that it will operate in good faith, either. In fact, «any behavioural commitment from Microsoft to grant rivals access to Call of Duty could pose a greater, not lesser, risk for consumers,» says Sony. Why? Because the «myriad ways Microsoft could withhold or degrade access would be extremely difficult to monitor and police».

When it says «myriad ways,» Sony is referring to various little tweaks a Microsoft-owned Activision could hypothetically make to COD to make it