Game news “PlayStation will not recover,” says Jim Ryan when Microsoft downgrades “Call of Duty” to PS5
The respite was short-lived in the disagreement between Sony and Microsoft as part of the American company’s takeover of Activision-Blizzard. After a negative opinion, the UK regulator changed its position before issuing its final verdict at the end of the month. Apparently, the news made Sony and Jim Ryan react.
UK withdraws preliminary advice on acquisition of Activision Blizzard King
That’s good on the British side that the next decision Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard is set to take place later this month after the European Union announced the release of sWe will have the final opinion on May 22nd
To counter this argument and use it to pacify cloud gaming, Microsoft has announced many previous agreements with Steam, NVIDIA, Nintendo and other cloud gaming services and press release new documents that have been carefully analyzed through the CMA. A few weeks later, the situation turned around! Martin Coleman, Chair of the CMA’s Independent Panel of Experts, is finally here returned to the preliminary conclusions from the UK regulator:
Having considered the additional evidence submitted, we have tentatively concluded that the merger will not result in a material reduction in competition in console gaming services, as the costs to Microsoft of removing Call of Duty from PlayStation would outweigh the benefits of such action . We have considered the parties’ and third parties’ comments on our LTV model and modified the input data where appropriate. Based on our updated results, our quantitative modeling indicates that a full foreclosure strategy would result in significant net financial losses to the parties under all scenarios we consider plausible.
In other words, the CMA agrees with Microsoft that Depriving an entire market of Call of Duty wouldn’t make sense from a business point of view, but still worried about the cloud.
For Sony, a downgraded version of Call of Duty on PlayStation could kill the brand
Obviously, Sony has not stood by and denounced a position “surprising, original and irrational”. Among the arguments of the Japanese company we find the idea that Microsoft could intentionally distributing minor versions of Call of Duty PlayStation players to encourage media switching. Microsoft, of course, denies it, and Sony rsorry not to have been heard To this topic :
Any degradation in price, performance, or game quality on PlayStation, or any delay in release would quickly damage SIE’s reputation and result in loss of engagement and players. (…). The addendum appears to ignore that statement, as well as other evidence showing player sensitivity, and posits that while Call of Duty is recognized as important for console competition, it could be downgraded without requiring players to change.
As SIE CEO Jim Ryan explained at the time of the appeal hearing, it would “seriously damage our reputation if PlayStation received a downgraded version of Call of Duty. Our players would leave our platform en masse, and network effects would exacerbate the problem. Our business would never recover.
Officially, Microsoft has no intention of capping Call of Duty viewership on any platform. Obviously it is impossible to know what the Redmond firm will actually do as soon as the takeover has taken place, provided that it is approved. Keep in mind that the stakes are high since the operation has been announced a nearly $70 billion deal. Additionally, as GAFAM, Microsoft sees its activities under scrutiny from the various regulators.
