Sony still seems worried about Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Of course, this can be seen from Sony's argument that they are worried about the future of the Call of Duty series on their platform.
Some time ago, Sony sent documents to the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) in England. In the document, Sony is concerned that Microsoft will increase the price of the Call of Duty game, make the game only available on Xbox Game Pass, and also risk reducing the quality and performance of the game for PlayStation.
Are there indications from Sony that Microsoft is sabotaging Call of Duty PlayStation?
Sony said there might be a situation where Microsoft will release the Call of Duty game on PlayStation with bugs and errors when released later. According to them this could happen and repairs could be too late.
As a result of this possibility, players are hesitant to have PlayStation as a platform to play Call of Duty. It is also known that this game performs worse on PlayStation than Xbox.
Players who experience this on the Sony platform can of course choose to move to Xbox on the grounds that playing on PlayStation is not very effective and competitively inferior.
Broadly speaking, Sony's fear of the various ways in which Microsoft is indicated to be sabotaging Call of Duty is by reducing quality and performance, ignoring PlayStation features such as haptic feedback to not use them, even limiting or reducing multiplayer game performance on the platform.
Concerns from Sony
This fear is not a surprising thing where both parties have been eyeing the franchise by releasing exclusive skins, bonuses, and even other things that benefit only one party so that players choose their console.
But these fears are still not proven and it is very unlikely that Microsoft will deliberately sabotage Call of duty on the Playstation platform by doing the things mentioned.
The thing that allows Microsoft to do is to prioritize bug fixes on the Xbox and PC versions because their development team is more familiar and familiar with the platform so that fixes can be done more quickly.
Sony is also concerned that Microsoft will include Call of Duty on Xbox Game Pass and won't allow Sony to include the game on PlayStation Plus. By doing so, Sony is worried that Micorsoft will indirectly destroy Sony's subscription business model commercially.
Microsoft itself has offered a 10-year contract for the Call of Duty game to Sony, but they have yet to sign the contract. Microsoft itself also said that they had signed a 10-year contract with Nintendo to bring the game to the Nintendo platform.
The cooperation was announced hours before a key meeting with regulators in Europe last month. Microsoft also announced the same offer to Nvidia a few hours later to get Sony to agree to their agreement.
However, according to Sony, in the documents sent to CMA, Microsoft has shown no commitment to the outcome of these negotiations. Phil Spencer as a Microsoft official also brought the topic of this negotiation to a public forum.
On the other hand, European regulators seem to have approved the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft. This agreement occurred because of the negotiations that Microsoft made to Nintendo and Nvidia. Microsoft also seems not required to sell assets from Activision Blizzard as a condition for regulatory approval.
