Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com October 12 news, in January this year, Microsoft Xbox announced the acquisition of game giant Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion (about 438.306 billion yuan).

Spencer, head of Microsoft's Xbox business, promised that even if the company's deal to buy well-known game developer Activision Blizzard was approved, the call of Duty series would still be available on Sony's PlayStation console for "several years" (beyond Sony's existing contract with Activision), and that the future three "call of Duty" games would still be launched on the PS platform. Phil Spencer added, "We value our relationship with Sony."

But in fact, Sony SIE has been worried about the Microsoft acquisition, mainly because of future release plans for the call of Duty series and whether it will be removed from their platform. CTOnews.com learned that the call of Duty series is usually PlayStation's best seller of the year.

Sony is now telling the UK competition regulator that it believes that even if Microsoft runs the games on PlayStation after Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, some call of Duty players will still turn to Xbox.

This is partly because Sony believes that if Microsoft's acquisition is approved, the future of the Xbox and PlayStation versions may be increasingly different in call of Duty. For example, if Microsoft introduces call of Duty to Game Pass subscriptions, it will bring obvious benefits to consumers.

Although Xbox has repeatedly promised that the call of Duty series, the best-selling game of the year in the United States, will still be launched on the PlayStation platform, Sony is gradually engaged in an increasingly public war of words over the deal. Ryan, president of SIE, previously told the media that Microsoft's attitude towards the future "call of duty" was "inadequate on many levels."

CMA in the UK has previously expressed similar concerns that the deal could hurt PlayStation and other game subscription services if Microsoft changed Activision Blizzard's content to Xbox.

In response to CMA, Microsoft said it had "no intention of taking call of Duty away from players" and claimed that doing so would "damage the reputation of call of Duty and the Xbox brand".

However, in a document released by CMA, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) said that even if Microsoft kept its promise to maintain the diversity of the series, it could still add exclusive features to the Xbox version of call of Duty, so it "may" affect players' choice of consoles.

"SIE told CMA that even if CoD is still available on the merged PlayStation, the merged entity can still make partial foreclosure by increasing the differentiation of the versions on Xbox and PlayStation," the UK regulatory filing said.

According to SIE, players may subconsciously think that call of Duty on Xbox will contain more and additional content, as well as enhanced interaction and operability with the host hardware, plus the benefits of XGP membership, so players will still fall back to the Xbox host.

CTOnews.com warns that Sony is well aware of the appeal of call of Duty exclusive content to consumers because Sony has had its own exclusive content for most of the past decade. In recent years, for example, PlayStation users have often received exclusive rewards such as call of Duty content updates and free prop kits before other platforms.

Sony: buying other studios is to help them, not to compete.

Sony: Microsoft is not sincere and can only stay on the PS platform for 3 more years.

"Sony PlayStation Jim Ryan made a special flight to the European Union to express concern about Microsoft Xbox's acquisition of Activision Blizzard."

"Microsoft says that even if it buys Activision Blizzard, Sony and Nintendo are still the biggest players in traditional games."

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