Infinity Ward / Activision Blizzard
In its latest response to the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, Sony expresses concern over Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzardmore worries. They’re now suggesting that Microsoft might (perhaps unintentionally) cripple the performance and quality of Call of Duty on the PlayStation platform, and that players might move to the Xbox camp as a result. “Microsoft may launch a version on the PS where bugs only appear in the final stages of the game or following a subsequent update,” Sony wrote in the filing. “Even if such vandalism is quickly discovered, any Any remedy may come too late, by which time the player community will lose faith in PS as the platform of choice for playing Call of Duty.”
Sony also cited Modern Warfare II as an example, pointing out that sales of the Call of Duty series were mostly concentrated in the first few weeks of the game’s release. “If people know that the game isn’t performing as well on PlayStation as on Xbox, Call of Duty players might move to Xbox because they’re worried they’re playing their favorite game on a second-tier or less competitive platform.”
Sony believes that neither itself nor the Authority has been able to find a feasible way to evaluate “how Microsoft allocated resources and engineers (both numbers and capabilities) to the PS version of Call of Duty” to “ensure that Sony receives fair and equal treat”. But considering that the PS platform contributes most of the revenue of “Calling Moment”, it may not be a wise move for Microsoft to deliberately reduce the quality of the game on this platform. After the big turmoil caused by the acquisition, if there is a problem with the PS version, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard may face much more violent criticism than Sony.
In response to this, Microsoftto respondSaid that he has “provided Sony with the same conditions as the Xbox platform in terms of release date, content, features, updates, quality and playability.” If Sony accepts the ten-year agreement proposed by Microsoft, the latter is willing to introduce a third party to evaluate and monitor the equality of the platform. In addition, Microsoft also expressed that Sony’s concern that “Call Call” may become an exclusive game for Xbox Game Pass is purely unnecessary. “As we’ve always said, it doesn’t make any commercial sense to rip Call of Duty off PlayStation,” Rima Alaily, corporate vice president of competition law at Microsoft, said in an interview. Axios Said so during the interview.
Whether Microsoft can advance Activision Blizzard, the Authority will give a final ruling before April 26. They had expressed their doubts before, but following the news that Microsoft promised to bring “Decisive Moment” and other works to platforms such as Nintendo and NVIDIA GeForce Now, the European Commission and other institutions that had not expressed their support attitudes were opened. Green light, which may affect the decision of the British side to a certain extent.
Speaking of Nintendo, Microsoft also detailed how it will make the “Call of Duty” game run on the Switch, which is far inferior to PS and Xbox in performance. It is said that the development team will achieve this by “optimizing display resolution, in-game texture resolution, reducing rendering speed, and simplifying advanced rendering techniques (such as ray tracing, etc.)”, which means that the Switch version cannot match the image quality. Not making some sacrifices. But this should be expected for the veteran player group.
It is worth mentioning that Microsoft also mentioned in the materials submitted this time that it will use the new “Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile” (Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile) outside of mainland China in the future.Gradually replaceExisting Call of Duty Mobile. The latter will support a cross-platform progress sharing system, which can better interact with PCs and consoles, and should be of greater help in integrating the entire “Decisive Moment” ecosystem.