As you probably know, Microsoft announced its plan to buy another video game giant a few months ago, Activision Blizzard, for $70 billion. This would allow him to acquire many studios and licenses such as Diablo, World of Warcraft, and especially Call of Duty. But an acquisition of this magnitude requires the authorization of a number of government agencies around the world, in order to ensure that there is no monopoly situation. This involves the American FTC and the European Commission, to name the two main ones, but they are far from being the only ones. The procedure of these agencies is generally to consult various notable stakeholders in the field, in order to obtain their opinion on the matter, this includes Ubisoft, Warner Bros, Apple, Riot, Google, Amazon, and of course, Sony, which has an opinion. clear cut on the issue.
The opinion of the video game giants on the acquisition of Activision Blizzard exposed
Around 20 regulatory agencies are involved, with countries like Japan, China, the UK, each with their own process and consultations. This also includes Brazil, with the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE), which has the distinction of being very transparent. This means that the vast majority of the documents of the said procedure and the exchanges between the organizations concerned are available online (in Portuguese), and they can be consulted freely. Some sections remain hidden for reasons of confidentiality, but one can consult there particularly tasty exchanges between Microsoft and Sony. Idas, a user of the Resetera forums, took care to gather this information and translate it. And inevitably, what interests us in this case is Sony’s long response, which Microsoft was able to consult, and to which it, in turn, responded. It is in this context that the interesting accusations we refer to above have emerged: Microsoft is distinctly accusing Sony of paying studios and publishers to contractually prohibit them from making their game available in competing online services, including the Gamepass specifically. Documents on the subject had already emerged last year, during the lawsuit between Apple vs. Epic.
Proxy chat between Sony and Microsoft
You can consult the very long compilation of exchanges between Sony and Microsoft through their respective responses to Brazilian CADE in this thread, still by Idas, on Resetera (in English). However, here are the main points that were exchanged:
- Sony believes that all games compete for player interest, and that no developer can compete with Activision’s Call of Duty franchise. It is a unique and irreplaceable franchise. And they believe Game Pass is anti-competitive for publishers and those who rely on selling consoles. This model could also reduce the quality of the games. They also estimate that it would take several years to create a competitor to Game Pass. Finally, Sony says that Call of Duty is a big source of revenue for Playstation consoles, and they don’t want Microsoft to have the exclusive.
- Microsoft then responded to these elements, again via CADE. Microsoft says its ability to expand Game Pass has been hampered by Sony’s desire to prevent that growth, and that Sony would pay for the right to block the addition of content on Game Pass and other competing subscription services. Additionally, Microsoft adds thatit does not intend to keep Activision Blizzard games only on its platforms and services, as this would not be profitable. For that, it would have to be able to attract enough new players to the Xbox ecosystem, to compensate for the loss of sales caused by the absence of these games on Sony consoles (among others), and this is not the case. . According to their calculations, the costs of exclusivity strategies would be too high, and even if they were applied, it would not produce an anti-competitive situation.
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