Microsoft has debunked Sony’s claim about Call of Duty with their own evidence.
Sony has made the argument that Call of Duty players would move from PlayStation to Xbox if Microsoft was able to finalize their deal to buy Call of Duty’s owner company, Activision Blizzard King.
Sony is the main industry objector to the deal, claiming that Call of Duty players would move consoles from PlayStation to Xbox if the deal was finalized. Our initial report indicated Sony’s speculation that Microsoft would make exclusive content for Call of Duty on their platforms.
Since then, Microsoft offered parity deals for Call of Duty to non-Xbox platforms, and Sony’s argument have been refined further. Today, they point towards evidence like a CMA commissioned survey from December, claiming that 15 % of their respondents who are big Call of Duty players would make that switch between consoles.
As reported by Axios, Microsoft commissioned YouGov to make their own survey. YouGov’s results found that only 3 % of all PlayStation users would move from PlayStation to Xbox if the deal pulled through. This survey also found that 10.5 % of big Call of Duty players would move consoles.
Corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Competition Law Group Rima Alaily had this to say:
“As we have said all along: it makes zero business sense to take Call of Duty off of PlayStation.”
Furthermore, she stated that the 3 % number of overall PlayStation owners, not just Call of Duty fans, was “too small to hurt Sony’s ability to compete and too small to make a withholding strategy profitable for Xbox.”
To rephrase these arguments in another way, Sony claimed they would be losing a lot of PlayStation players if Microsoft bought Call of Duty, based on a metric that looked pointedly at avid Call of Duty players.
Microsoft’s surveys and new evidence has different findings, and point to a broader picture. They found that that number of Call of Duty players willing to switch consoles was 10 %, not 15 %.
But even more important than that, that number of Call of Duty players is only a hypothetical 3 % of the PlayStation userbase.
This argument isn’t necessarily the end of the debate on whether the acquisition fits the theory of harm, but of course Microsoft seeks to whittle down Sony’s case vs the acquisition as much as possible.
The UK and European regulators will be releasing their final decisions on approving or rejecting this deal this April, and the FTC suit vs the deal is scheduled for August, assuming they do not settle first. Please keep following GameRanx for updates on the Microsoft – Activision Blizzard King acquisition.
