Microsoft Promised To Put Call Of Duty On PlayStation Plus

Microsoft has been making promises to various companies and regulators because of the strong opposition to the Microsoft acquisition of Activision-Blizzard-King from a number of groups. The latest promise is that Microsoft would bring Call of Duty to the PlayStation Plus platform for ten years. This is something that Sony still refuses to accept though.

 

This news was reported by Bloomberg, and it shows yet another attempt by Microsoft to quell the concerns that Sony continues to push on regulators. The main issue that Sony has is that Microsoft owning Call of Duty will allow them to dominate the gaming market through sheer market share rather than through more genuine competitive practices, like simply competing with Sony by making better first-party games.

Microsoft has already committed to bringing Call of Duty to Steam and Nintendo for the next ten years, something that both companies accepted in differing ways, but Sony still refuses to budge. This even led the president of Microsoft to compare Sony to Blockbuster in an attempt to claim that Sony is being irrational by not wanting to accept this massive acquisition that has even been heavily criticized by the FTC to the point where the regulator has even moved to issue a lawsuit to block this acquisition as it would undermine competitive practices in the games industry.

The promise to bring Call of Duty to the PlayStation Plus service is an interesting one though as Xbox has famously promoted its own service, the Xbox Game Pass, for many years now and will continue to do so. However, every promise to bring Call of Duty anywhere other than Microsoft platforms is always connected to a specific number, and that number is ten years. They always promise that the franchise will be available for ten years on non-Microsoft platforms, but ten years, in the world of business, is not very long.

Sony knows that ten years will end sooner than we all realize, and when that happens, Microsoft will have full control over Call of Duty until the franchise, like all franchises, eventually ends, but how long will it actually take for something as massive as Call of Duty to die? And that is Sony’s main concern here.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed