Microsoft has been making big promises lately to get regulators to clear Activision Blizzard’s acquisition for a total of $69 billion. Among those promises is a deal offered to Sony whereby Call of Duty would remain available on PlayStation consoles for ten yearsa deal that also reportedly includes the rights to PlayStation Plus.
As reported by Bloomberg, the rights to sell the title through the PlayStation subscription service were promised along with the offer that Microsoft previously made to Sony promising ten years of Call of Duty on PlayStation if the acquisition went through. Activision Blizzard. Sony has yet to accept the offer and has continued to raise concerns about the acquisition with the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the Federal Trade Commission.
The PlayStation Plus inclusion offer is especially noteworthy given Microsoft’s growing promotion of its own subscription service, Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft has previously stated its intentions to include Call of Duty in Game Pass if the deal closes, and Sony has claimed that Game Pass leads PlayStation Plus “significantly” in subscriber numbers.
In the meantime, Nintendo recently agreed to the deal ten-year contract offered by Microsoft to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles, and Valve boss Gabe Newell indicated that he had no need for such a contract, but was happy to continue working with Microsoft “after” (in the words of Newell) for the deal to close.
Despite Newell’s confidence, the deal is far from done. Recently, the FTC announced it was filing a lawsuit to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzardalleging that the deal would “hurt competition in high-performance game consoles and subscription services by denying or downgrading rivals’ access to their popular content.”
