by
William D’Angelo
, posted 12 hours ago / 1,447 Views
Sony Interactive Entertainment’s response to Microsoft’s remedies over its Activision Blizzard acquisition sent to the UK regulators, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), was published earlier today and the company says behavioral remedies are insufficient to address concerns by the regulators.
Sony claims Microsoft has multiple ways it “could withhold or degrade access [which] would be extremely difficult to monitor and police.”
If Microsoft were to fail to comply with behavioral remedies Sony states Microsoft would only risk paying a fine.
“If Microsoft failed to comply with its commitment, it would likely only risk paying a fine (possibly many years later),” said Sony. “But rivals’ access to Call of Duty would be immediately foreclosed, irreparably damaging their ability to compete and ultimately harming consumers.”
Sony claims one way Microsoft could circumvent its obligations to release Call of Duty on PlayStation is to make the Call of Duty games buggy on PlayStation consoles.
“Swiftly detecting any diversions from, and ensuring compliance with, a commitment as to technical or graphical quality would be challenging,” said Sony. “For example, Microsoft might release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where bugs and errors emerge only on the game’s final level or after later updates.
“Even if such degradations could be swiftly detected, any remedy would likely come too late, by which time the gaming community would have lost confidence in PlayStation as a go-to venue to play Call of Duty.
“Indeed, as Modern Warfare II attests, Call of Duty is most often purchased in just the first few weeks of release. If it became known that the game’s performance on PlayStation was worse than on Xbox, Call of Duty gamers could decide to switch to Xbox, for fear of playing their favorite game at a second-class or less competitive venue.”
Sony added that Microsoft would be incentivized to prioritize the Xbox version of Call of Duty games.
“Even if Microsoft operated in good faith, it would be incentivized to support and prioritize development of the Xbox version of the game, such as by using its best engineers and more of its resources,” said Sony.
“There would be no practical way for the CMA (or SIE) to monitor how Microsoft chooses to allocate its resources and the quality/quantity of engineers it devotes to the PlayStation version of Call of Duty, to ensure that SIE would be treated fairly and equally.”
A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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William D’Angelo