The takeover of Activision-Blizzard-King by Microsoft is not progressing. Things may even get worse: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC, the American competition authority) is about to launch a lawsuit to block the takeover. Current FTC boss Lina Khan doesn’t hold big tech boxes close to her heart, so much so that Amazon and Facebook had unsuccessfully requested that she not be part of the cases concerning the boxes in question because of its positions on the subject in the past.
At the center of the debate is obviously Call Of Duty. It must be said that on November 7, Activision announced that Modern Warfare II had brought in 800 million dollars in three days, a record for the license. In 10 days, the sequel to the Infinity Ward reboot hit the billion mark. On November 11, Microsoft made an attractive offer to Sony: to guarantee that CoD would remain on PlayStation for 10 years. Sony has not commented on the offer in question but we are curious to know the conditions. Does this include releasing CoDs on PlayStation the same day as Xbox? What about Game Pass?
In order to assuage the concerns of the CMA (the British FTC), Microsoft is trying a different approach. The manufacturer explains that even if CoD had an exclusive, it would not change anything because “Sony has more excluded than Microsoft and often of better quality. […] Games developed internally at Sony and Nintendo are among the best-selling games in Europe and the world.” The quality aspect is debatable and we let the fanboys kill each other, but the quantity aspect is particularly true this year. the fact that Xbox Game Studios has 23 in-house studios, they only released one new game in 2022: Pentiment. Meanwhile, Sony sold 5 million God Of War Ragnarok in 5 days and Nintendo sold 10 million of Pokémon Purple/Scarlet in three days.