At long last, PlayStation has signed a deal with Microsoft to keep Call of Duty on their platform, after Microsoft finalizes their acquisition of Call of Duty owner Activision Blizzard King.
Xbox head Phil Spencer made the announcement himself on Twitter:
“We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and @PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games.”
Microsoft President Brad Smith then quote tweeted Phil and shared his own statement on the news:
“From Day One of this acquisition, we’ve been committed to addressing the concerns of regulators, platform and game developers, and consumers.
Even after we cross the finish line for this deal’s approval, we will remain focused on ensuring that Call of Duty remains available on more platforms and for more consumers than ever before.”
This is the culmination of a process that took over a year now, when Microsoft and Activision first announced their plans to merge.
Sony would emerge to be one of the greatest opponents of this merger. Rather than take any direct legal action or make a public PR war about it, Sony decided to run to the regulators.
As is now well documented, Sony would talk to the CMA, EU, and FTC, sharing their arguments for why the deal should not be allowed to go through, and mainly pushing the console theory of harm.
At the same time, Sony would occasionally publicly respond to certain developments or revelations in the course of regulators investigating the deal. It should be noted that unlike Microsoft, Sony did not pay for any advertising to convince the public to side with them.
We now know thanks to those same investigations that Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan was initially not opposed to the deal. In a letter, he had expressed the opinion that their competitor was making a play at a different market, and that they had the money to do so.
However, in the time the company spend opposing the merger, Sony turned around with a new argument, that Microsoft would either remove or degrade Call of Duty games on PlayStation, and that this would harm PlayStation’s business. Curiously, the company stuck with that particular franchise, as opposed to the many other multiplayer games under the Activision Blizzard banner.
The EU and CMA would both go on to reject the console gaming theory of harm. Consequently, while the FTC seemed willing to entertain the idea, it was rejected by District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in the FTC’s attempt to file an injunction to block the whole deal.
At one point, SIE president Jim Ryan was revealed to have said that he didn’t want to make a deal, he just wanted to block the merger. Now that the FTC’s injunction and appeal were rejected, and the CMA is talking to Microsoft about remedies again, Sony has no choice but to sign on to a deal themselves.
The alternative situation could have played out, where Microsoft continued to publish Call of Duty on PlayStation without any contract. Sony would, however, then get no guarantee that they would keep getting Call of Duty games for the next ten years, something Nintendo, Nvidia, and other companies got from Microsoft.
Valve, in fact, is willing to allow Microsoft to publish Call of Duty games on their platform as they see fit. But where Valve trusts Microsoft, Sony does not. Jim had to guarantee that PlayStation would not be missing out on one of their biggest cash cows for the coming decade.
Now, as Tom Warren of The Verge has confirmed, the deal is only for Call of Duty, and it will only be for ten years. Warren states that Microsoft originally offered more Activision Blizzard games to sweeten this contract. Of course, after Sony tried to get in the way of this merger and failed, they got a smaller offer.
And with this deal, Sony is in equal footing as Nintendo, Nvidia, Ubitus, and Boosteroid, when it comes to getting Call of Duty games.
