There is plenty of chatter online regarding Activision Blizzard. Since Microsoft bid to purchase the company for a massive amount of money, the road to acquiring Activision Blizzard has been rough. It’s been an ongoing battle between Microsoft and Sony over this deal, and currently, regulators are looking into the matter. With Sony hopeful that this deal never goes through and Microsoft is seeking to remedy any issues that might pop up, the battle presses forward. Today, we’re getting the CMA responses from several companies on last month’s CMA findings.
It was last month that the CMA felt that Microsoft would have incentives to make Call of Duty an exclusive for Xbox and PC platforms. That’s the big issue here, as Call of Duty continues to be the focal point of this deal. Meanwhile, Microsoft has since gone on a barrage of making contract legally binding deals to ensure that Call of Duty will remain on competitor platforms for at least ten years. With nearly a hundred pages of response to the CMA, Microsoft is pointing out that not only do they have no intentions of making Call of Duty exclusive, but they also have legal contracts to keep them from doing so.
Those contract deals are still going out, with Microsoft signing two additional companies, Boosteroid and Ubitus, being the latest to acquire a ten-year contract deal. That would allow Call of Duty to continue popping up on other platforms long after the acquisition goes through. You can find the entire breakdown of Microsoft’s response right here.
Meanwhile, Sony has continued to point at different ways Microsoft could harm the competition by acquiring Call of Duty. This includes everything from making it an exclusive to even releasing a subpar product of the game for PlayStation platforms. They have been quite vocal against the deal, and their response breakdown is far shorter than Microsoft, with it being just ten pages in length.
Of course, you also have responses from Activision Blizzard, which strongly disagrees with the CMA provisional conclusion. So it’s still very much a hot topic debate between the companies right now with no certainty of whether or not Activision Blizzard will be absorbed into Microsoft. Even the FTC has chimed in as they seek out more details of the recent contract deals and future exclusive plans for Microsoft’s previous acquisition, ZeniMax Media.
