Sony Threatened by Microsoft Activision Acquisition – Cries of $1.5 Billion Losses by 2027

Without exclusive first rights to downloadable content on the world’s largest GaaS slurry of slop, how will Sony cope moving forward?

Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard was met with much distain by the likes of Sony, who’ve spent the better part of a decade buying out various studios for first-party rights, crying fowl in regards to Microsoft doing the exact same only on a much greater scale.

Sony actually views the merger as a substantial threat to its console and subscription divisions as it contends with the challenge of developing the optimal game subscription service to extort console players dry.

Sony was so concerned about the merger that Microsoft had to provide assurance, pledging to make Call of Duty accessible on PlayStation for the next decade. This commitment was made due to the substantial revenue generated by the Call of Duty franchise, making it one of the most lucrative money printers in the gaming world.

Redmond’s 10-year commitment managed to appease all regulators except the FTC, who attempted to block the acquisition. Nevertheless, leaked documents from the Insomniac hack reveal Sony’s ongoing deep concerns. The gaming giant perceives Microsoft’s acquisition as massive threat that could potentially enable Microsoft to surpass Sony in the console market.

According to a “confidential” presentation slide, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision positions it to “leapfrog” Sony in the console market. Activision is seen as providing significant strategic value in live service games, scale in mobile, and the PC storefront (Battle.net).

The slide underscores Microsoft’s venture into building a mobile game store to compete with Apple and Google, slated for launch in 2024. However, the success of this endeavor is contingent on regulatory actions compelling Apple and Google to open up their ecosystems to the extent that an alternative store can thrive. While there have been some developments in this direction, it remains uncertain if it’s enough to allow an Xbox store to flourish on competing platforms.

Sony’s understandably bleak forecast anticipates the impending decline of Call of Duty in 2027, well before the conclusion of the 10-year commitment. The company firmly believes that this acquisition poses a significant threat to both the console and subscription sectors.

But how is this possible when Microsoft has committed to 10 years of Call of Duty?

Sony envisions Xbox surpassing PlayStation by strategically leveraging release timing. While Microsoft committed to a decade of Call of Duty, it did not specify that game launches would coincide on both consoles. Sony perceives Microsoft exploiting this “exclusivity” period to enhance its subscription dominance by making Activision games available on Game Pass “day and date” (from day one).

This concept is asinine at best, considering how the last time I personally cared about the franchise, regularly playing the annual releases on my XBOX 360, Microsoft at the time were the ones paying Activision big dollars for favorable timed releases of the latest Call of Duty DLC packages.

From as far back as I can remember, from 2009’s release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Microsoft had either a week to as much as a month exclusivity when it came to DLC packages on its platform over the likes of PC and Sony’s PlayStation.

Microsoft had effectively held this timed exclusivity in regards to Call of Duty DLC content from 2011 to 2016, with the release of Black Ops 3 revealing that it was now Sony who were bidding for exclusive timed rights to the latest DLC for COD.

And Sony for lack of a better term has been holding this “monopolization” since 2016, with Sony PlayStation systems now getting preferential treatment in regards to the latest microtransactional bullshit that’s frequently added to the Call of Duty franchise.

Nevertheless, because the entire name of the game is to simply be first, not to actually provide a better experience for players, Sony doesn’t do that given the amount of times they’ve shunned multi-platform online play, Sony are immensely threatened by the fact that they are now losing timed exclusivity on Call of Duty.

Having invested significant sums in securing exclusive timed rights since the PS4/XBOX ONE console generation, Sony is now apprehensive about losing such exclusivity. They estimate a potential loss of profits in the range of over $1.5 billion by 2027, as the prospect of increased competition looms large, a notion the company finds particularly unsettling.

Sony is quick to criticize Microsoft for their monopolistic tactics, conveniently overlooking their own transgressions in leveraging monopolization strategies. It appears that in Sony’s view, such practices are objectionable only when directed toward them.

In the evolving landscape of modern gaming as a service model, both Sony and Microsoft heavily rely on the sales of subscription services like PlayStation Plus and its various iterations, alongside XBOX Live and the Game Pass offerings.

These services have experienced a significant boost following the acquisitions of ZeniMax and Activision. Despite this, Sony’s PlayStation Plus falls short in comparison, lacking in content and games, while both are immensely overvalued. This Games as a Service model ultimately does not benefit consumers in the long run.

Sony should be focusing more on producing more competitive titles, rather than movie-like experiences with ballooning budgets of well over $100 Million dollars, because quite frankly their PlayStation 5 console after three years on the shelf barely has any actual “exclusives” to its name.

Sony has access to plethora’s of intellectual property that they’ve abandoned, such as Resistance and Killzone, but will they ever do anything with those IP ever again? Probably not.

Instead of actually producing games for “the players”, they are instead bitching about losing rights to consumer “monopolies” in timed exclusivity dealings for Call of Duty microtransactions, heaven forbid that Sony players will have to wait a month to get access to the latest Niki Minaj operator bundle.

Rather than producing games for their console and ecosystem Sony have instead directed their attention towards abusing their former home nation of Japan by invoking western globalized censorship policies upon Japanese developers outside of movie Sony Interactive Entertainment’s headquarters to California.

I really don’t care for these crocodile tears, I however am baffled by the fact that these two colossal assholes view Call of Duty as some sort of industrial game changer to leverage over the other.