It’s been a chaotic week sony and Microsoft. Media types and players alike have been trawling search pages sniffing out snark bytes from both companies in an effort to make themselves look than they actually are.
The end result, of course, is that Sony is throwing up enough sand that regulators won’t let Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition go through. Microsoft, on the other hand, wanted it to look like it needed a huge publisher under its wing to survive the competition from Sony and Nintendo. result? Everyone looked a little silly, and the back and forth got a lot of other companies on board too.
Earlier this week, we saw Microsoft assert that Call of Duty players are neither unique nor special–by far, my favorite quote. We’ve also seen that, in addition to calling The Elder Scrolls 6 a “medium-sized” game, Microsoft is willing to leave its own exclusives behind in order to make it look like it’s going to be hard to get done.
PlayStation is also playing the game; Sony notes that Xbox Game Pass is “significantly ahead” of PS Plus in terms of active users (although Sony’s service has 47+ million subscribers to Xbox Game Pass’ 29 million).
We’re not done yet. In comments found in Sony’s 22-page rebuttal to the CMA investigation, the platform holder casts some shade on EA’s Battlefield. In the filing, Sony argues that Call of Duty is a uniquely important franchise for PlayStation that cannot be easily replaced by anything else. For example, Battlefield.
“Call of Duty is not reproducible,” Sony said in the filing. It’s been the best-selling game in nearly every year of the past decade, and it’s the absolute best-selling game in the first-person shooter (“FPS”) genre.
“No other publisher has the resources or expertise to match its success. To give a concrete example, Electronic Arts — one of the largest third-party developers after Activision — has been trying to get its Battlefield series off the ground for years. Despite the ” There are similarities between Call of Duty and Battlefield – despite EA’s track record developing other successful AAA franchises such as FIFA, Mass Effect, Need for Speed and Star Wars: Battlefront – but The Battlefield franchise can’t keep going up.”
The document goes on to state that as of August 2021, Call of Duty games have sold more than 400 million units, while Battlefield has only sold 88.7 million units. That’s a gap of over 300 million — so Sony has a point. Especially considering that last year’s Battlefield 2042 was a bit of a flop (and already lost players by February 2022).
This back-and-forth between Sony and Microsoft will get uglier over time, and Call of Duty will get more attention as the two companies do everything they can to convince regulators that they’re right.
It’s going to be an interesting few years in the gaming world.
