Chief said Microsoft Brad Smith, that his company has offered its counterpart Sony a 10-year contract to make each new version of the game, Call of Duty, available on its gaming platform, PlayStation, at the same time as it is released on Microsoft’s Xbox platform.
The US tech giant hopes the move will assuage concerns of regulators and its competitors regarding the monopoly that might result from its proposed $69 billion acquisition of Call of Duty developer Activision Blizzard.
And in the past month, Politico reported It is likely that the US Federal Trade Commission will file an antitrust lawsuit to prevent Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision.
In response, Smith wrote Opinion article In the Wall Street Journal on Monday, he defended the takeover as “good for players” and criticized any potential FTC lawsuit. Of the reported lawsuit, he said: “That would be a huge mistake. It will harm competition, consumers and thousands of game developers.”
Regulators in the European Union and the United Kingdom have opened antitrust investigations into the proposed Microsoft acquisition to see if the deal will harm competition. The European Union is concerned that Microsoft may block access to games such as Call of Duty to competitors.
And following Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Activision last January, Sony’s share prices fell, as investors feared that PlayStation would be deprived of Activision games. But Microsoft has since sought to allay those concerns.
Smith said any move to make Call of Duty unavailable for the PlayStation would be “economically inconsequential” because a vital portion of the game’s revenue comes from sales to Sony’s gaming platform.
“Given the popularity of cross-platform play, this would also be disastrous for Call of Duty and the Xbox itself, alienating millions of gamers,” he added.
Smith also said, “For this reason, we offered Sony a 10-year contract to make each new Call of Duty installment available on PlayStation at the same time it is available for Xbox. We are open to making the same commitment to other platforms and making it legally enforceable by US, UK and EU regulators.”
