Sony about the deal between Activision Blizzard and Microsoft

Published by 01 Aug, 2022 0 likes

International regulators continue to consider the takeover of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft for $70 billion.

This process is multistage, and in addition to examining all sorts of documents and market indicators, it involves gathering the views of different representatives of the industry.

Brazil's antitrust authorities interviewed publishers on the case in the spring, and judging by the answers that appeared online, the issue of the merger of the two giants is most worrying to Sony, for whose consoles the franchise Call of Duty is very important.

Answering questions from Brazilian regulators, Sony noted that Activision Blizzard is not the only publisher in the industry capable of producing AAA games with large sales and long-term income.

There are EA, Take-Two, Epic Games and other companies, but none of them is able to create a full-fledged competitor of Call of Duty, the platform holder believes.

There are successful shooters, but there are no other series in the genre, the representatives of which are consistently sold each year in multimillion copies.

According to Sony, Call of Duty is the responsibility of a huge team of thousands of people, operating with multimillion-dollar budgets and debugging the production model to brilliance.

The series is so popular that it sells consoles, and if it disappears from the consoles of one manufacturer, it will hit it.

Sony is sure that if another publisher gets the same budget to create a competitor Call of Duty as Call of Duty itself, it will still not work, since fans have formed certain habits and traditions — they buy Call of Duty, and other shooters get to know from case to case.

Judging by these answers, Sony also does not hope to create its own competitor Call of Duty in the future.

Sony also spoke about subscription services (Call of Duty and other Activision Blizzard games are expected to be released there over time).

She believes that such offers compete with one-time games purchases, and if a subscription is very cheap, it can be anti-competitive against publishers who invest huge amounts of money in games intended for distribution outside of subscriptions.

Moreover, Sony is confident that betting on subscription services can lead to a deterioration in the quality of games.

Commenting directly on the Xbox Game Pass from Microsoft, Sony indicated that it now occupies about 60-70% of the global subscription services market (in Brazil, the figure is 70-80%).

To create an effective competitor, such a giant will take several years, even with a very significant investment.

Earlier, Microsoft promised to keep the series on the PlayStation, and Sony hopes that it will, as the franchise is extremely important for her brand.

Regulators were presented with documents with graphs and figures confirming this — they were not published online.