Sony Agrees to 10-Year 'Call of Duty' Deal with Microsoft (theverge.com) 26
The Verge reports that Sony "has agreed to a 10-year deal for Call of Duty with Microsoft to keep the franchise on PlayStation after the proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition."
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says Sony and Microsoft have agreed to a "binding agreement" to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. This ends a bitter battle between the companies that has been waged both privately and publicly over the past year after Microsoft announced its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard in January 2022...
Kari Perez, head of global communications at Xbox, confirmed the 10-year commitment to The Verge. Perez later confirmed to The Verge that the deal is only for Call of Duty, though. That makes the deal similar to a 10-year agreement between Microsoft and Nintendo, but not the various deals Microsoft has struck with Nvidia and other cloud gaming platforms to bring Call of Duty and other Xbox / Activision games to rival services...
Microsoft has always maintained it would keep Call of Duty on PlayStation, arguing it doesn't make financial sense to pull the game from Sony's consoles. Xbox chief Spencer tried to settle the argument in November before appearing in court last month and reiterating, under oath, that Call of Duty would remain on PlayStation 5. All eyes are now on the regulatory situation in the UK, after Microsoft's proposed deal was blocked there earlier this year.
The Financial Times writes that the Sony-Microsoft agreement "signalled a truce between the two gaming giants after a bruising 18-month battle that had seen the Japanese company become the biggest opponent to the acquisition. It follows regulatory breakthroughs for Microsoft on both sides of the Atlantic last week that have left it on brink of clinching victory for a deal that is expected to reshape the gaming industry."
The Verge also shares this interesting detail: Tensions over the fate of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal really came to a head when [Sony's] Jim Ryan spoke to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick on February 21st, 2023 — the same day Microsoft, Activision, Sony, and others were meeting with EU regulators. Ryan said to Kotick, "I don't want a new Call of Duty deal. I just want to block your merger." Jim Ryan confirmed the meeting during testimony in the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. "I told him [Bobby Kotick] that I thought the transaction was anti-competitive, I hoped that the regulators would do their job and block it."
Kari Perez, head of global communications at Xbox, confirmed the 10-year commitment to The Verge. Perez later confirmed to The Verge that the deal is only for Call of Duty, though. That makes the deal similar to a 10-year agreement between Microsoft and Nintendo, but not the various deals Microsoft has struck with Nvidia and other cloud gaming platforms to bring Call of Duty and other Xbox / Activision games to rival services...
Microsoft has always maintained it would keep Call of Duty on PlayStation, arguing it doesn't make financial sense to pull the game from Sony's consoles. Xbox chief Spencer tried to settle the argument in November before appearing in court last month and reiterating, under oath, that Call of Duty would remain on PlayStation 5. All eyes are now on the regulatory situation in the UK, after Microsoft's proposed deal was blocked there earlier this year.
The Financial Times writes that the Sony-Microsoft agreement "signalled a truce between the two gaming giants after a bruising 18-month battle that had seen the Japanese company become the biggest opponent to the acquisition. It follows regulatory breakthroughs for Microsoft on both sides of the Atlantic last week that have left it on brink of clinching victory for a deal that is expected to reshape the gaming industry."
The Verge also shares this interesting detail: Tensions over the fate of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal really came to a head when [Sony's] Jim Ryan spoke to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick on February 21st, 2023 — the same day Microsoft, Activision, Sony, and others were meeting with EU regulators. Ryan said to Kotick, "I don't want a new Call of Duty deal. I just want to block your merger." Jim Ryan confirmed the meeting during testimony in the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. "I told him [Bobby Kotick] that I thought the transaction was anti-competitive, I hoped that the regulators would do their job and block it."
How anticompetitive would it be? (Score:3, Interesting)
Im not sure how anti-competitive the merger would really be at this point, looking at the list that studio owns I get (according to Wikipedia):
Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk's, Spyro, Skylanders, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and Candy Crush Saga.
Even if Sony lost all those I don't know it would be a giant blow. I think something else would rise to fill any gaps on Sony's hardware.... also I have to think large multiplayer games would suffer in terms of subscriber base if they did push any of those (like Call of Duty, or Hearthstone) to be exclusive.
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Yep no arguments here to any of that. Sony is indeed a giant in the space who could use a bit more sizable competition.
All Your PC Master Race Are Belong To Us. (Score:1)
No one cares. At all.
They didn't agree to it (Score:3, Insightful)
Government is capitalism's referee. In this case it's more like the referee at a pro wrestling match. That's fine for something like pro wrestling that isn't real but when you're talking an actual competition that affects people's lives having fake or neutered referees breaks the entire system. Something's got to give.
Put another way we're not doing the maintenance that the machinery of capitalism requires to keep running. It's going to break down soon and when it does we're either going to have to do another New deal style overhaul, descend into Neo-feudalism, or we're going to take another crack at full blown socialism and or communism.
I don't think we're ready for the Star Trek Utopia just yet so I would rather see us try to properly fix the system before it's too late.
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Heavy duty Court packing by anti-consumer judges
Not really. When even the EU regulator isn't against the merger you will find yourself making any claim of nefarious anti-consumerism here.
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When even the EU regulator isn't against the merger you will find yourself making any claim of nefarious anti-consumerism here.
Right, because regulators in the EU are better than other humans, and immune to illegal acts. They simply cannot perform them, they are so wonderful. Wait, where did the USA learn all its tricks again?
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Re: They didn't agree to it (Score:2)
The balance of power between governments and private business, capital and labor, bureaucrats and elected politicians are all different in europe.
Doesn't mean there is no corruption, or some officials driving policy based on personal ambitions. But the mix of incentives is different and most often pushes them in the opposite direction.
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Right, because regulators in the EU are better than other humans, and immune to illegal acts.
Yes. Oh wait you were going for sarcasm? Well it failed. Yes the EU regulator is far tougher on businesses and mergers than any other western regulator, especially the one in the USA. For the most part multinational companies barely concern themselves with the FTC under the guise of "If we can get it past the EU, we can get it past anyone."
There's also a difference in legal challenge, where the EU focuses exclusively on consumer behaviour, the FTC is ... how do I put it gently... political.
Anyway back on t
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Size itself does not lead to anti-consumerism.
Yes, it does.
Ownership doesn't either.
When it's Microsoft? Yes, it does. Remember how Bungie was cross-platform before Microsoft?
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They lost. Heavy duty Court packing by anti-consumer judges means that the FTC was blocked from enforcing basic antitrust laws here. As a direct result of this game prices are going to go up.
Oh my God, really?! Have you paid no attention to this case at all?
The FTC's argument for blocking the merger was complete and utter garbage. Their argument was essentially that the merger would harm Sony, and this meant that it was anti-competitive.
Except Sony leads in that space. Microsoft is at best a distance second, and only if you decide to explicitly exclude Nintendo. Throw in Nintendo and Microsoft becomes a distant third.
Even if we ignore that Sony leads the market, the FTC focused the case entirel
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Yes, yes, We get it. If people didn't reach the same conclusions as you, they must not have been paying attention.
Re: They didn't agree to it (Score:1)
Lina Khan has been overeager in pursuing anti-trust so she has lost EVERY single anti-trust lawsuit thus far, even in venues that are generally favorable to big government interventionism. Basically Khan thinks because she is head of the FTC, it makes her the boss of every business out there. Now Congress is holding hearings to âoeexamine mismanagement of the FTC and its disregard for ethics and congressional oversight under Chair Lina Khanâ
Read between the lines (Score:3)
It means that they plan to have that atrocity of a crappy, linear ticket shooter last another decade!
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It means that they plan to have that atrocity of a crappy, linear ticket shooter last another decade!
Shhhh.... It keeps the knuckle draggers and squeaking prepubescent kids away from better games.
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Sadly it doesn't. They come in, look around and whine "why isn't this more like Call of Battlefield?"
Now what about all those Playstation Exclusives. (Score:2)
Cloud gaming... (Score:3)
If I was Microsoft I would be approaching every cloud gaming provider out there (including the cloud gaming arm of Sony) and offering them deals to put Activision Blizzard content on those cloud gaming services.
i.e. pushing hard against the claim that if the merger goes through xcloud will have an unfair advantage by having exclusivity on Activision Blizzard content.
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Microsoft did. They have deals with GeForce Now and a few smaller providers.
Sony practically shut down their cloud gaming service for whatever
hahahaha Paul Thurott called out Sony (Score:2)
As Paul Thurott sumrised in his recent "Windows Weekly" podcase, failure to sign the agreement would have allowed Microsoft to say "Fuck You" and stop producing Call of Duty for the Playstation. Hey, it was a nice offer; but also, Microsoft/Activision earns a billion dollars a year from the COD franchise, so it would be dumb to stop production for the Playstation platform - and would probably trigger shareholder action.
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I wouldn't count on it. Microsoft has a long and ig-noble history of leaving money... sometimes free money... on the table if they can harm a competing platform by doing so. On the gaming side, it goes nearly back to the beginning; when they bought Bungie so as to keep Halo from being available on the Mac. If you will recall, Bungie was developing Halo for a simultaneous release on both Apple's and Microsoft's platforms. It was even demo'd first at a Macworld (Where it included gameplay features that MS
Last of Us (Score:2)
Years later, now there's a show about it and there's a sequel game too, I guess. I haven't seen the show. I hear it was fine. But I'm still waiting, because I wanted to enjoy the original material first.
More time passes and now my interest has waned, and the show existing, killed the rest of my interest, rather than interest me in "the world building" and f
We've been here before. (Score:3)
Oh, how quickly we forget. Microsoft have made these sort of "commitments" before. Back in Apple's "beleaguered" years in the 1990s, when Steve Jobs caught the house of gates with its hands in the Quicktime cookie jar, he extracted from them a "commitment" to continue producing both Internet Explorer and Office for the Mac. I think it was even for the same 10 years. And sure... they did continue to produce both Office and IE for the Mac. Jobs even made IE the default browser on the Mac.
But microsoft only *technically* kept their half of the bargain. They continued to release what they *called* IE and Office for the Mac. But they let both products wither on the vine and turn to (more) crap (than they already were). IE for Mac was gutted and stripped several features that were available on the windows version. Ironically, that actually made it a better producy than the windows release; as many of those features were part of the hot mess that is ActiveX. But missing, they definitely were. The post-concession release of Office was also crippled. Features were missing and performance and stability were resoundingly sub-par. And, of course, microsoft being microsoft; they rigged the file formats to be incompatible... but not overtly. The incompatibilities were crafted to be subtle and not easily noticed. But if you moved a document from one platform to the other... and especially if you did so more than once, like you would if you were trying to collaborate... you'd get increasing numbers of oddities like font problems, formatting errors, and dodgy imports of spreadsheets and especially images. Images could be a particular problem in the Mac version of Office if you needed them in the CMYK color space instead of RGB.
Basically, those 10-year Office and IE releases were pretty decrepit after 5 and all but unussable at 10. So we can all expect the Activision/Blizzard catalog (I really don't give a rat's ass about CoD, but Diablo is kind of a big deal.) on Playstation 5 to resemble Daikatana in 5 years and a pre-bugfix Cyberpunk running on a PS4 in 10 years.
Leopards don't change their spots.