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Of course they don’t want their competitor to own the biggest franchise on the planet. There is no reason to believe MS would’ve kept COD multiplat past the previously agreed upon deal.

This is factually incorrect. Regulators actually looked at this question and all came to the conclusion that Microsoft making COD exclusive would make the purchase of Activision unprofitable. There's no way Sony would have come to this conclusion. Jim Ryan even admitted as much in an internal email that was filed with court documents, which really kind of torpedoed the Call of Duty arguments in court. LINK Sony acted in bad faith from day one. It's truly appalling stuff and should absolutely anger gamers. Sony is ABSOLUTELY the bad guy in this MS/ABK story.

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Link?

LINK

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This is nonsense dude.

I don't think so at all. They have clearly shown that they believe losing Call of Duty gamers will be devastating to their business. They took lobbying the FTC to about as extreme as you could go in opposition to a purchase by a competitor. Literally stood alone on a hill while all other potentially affected parties said they had no issue with the deal whatsoever. They clearly believe this will be devastating to their business model.

The stupid part is that Microsoft offered Sony a deal for ALL future Activision games for any currently existing IP at the beginning of the year, and Sony turned it down so they could lobby regulators to oppose the deal. Sony knew that signing that deal with Microsoft would make their opposition to the deal look shallow.

Instead, they ended up with a deal JUST for Call of Duty (maybe that's all they care about) after the FTC lost in court because Microsoft no longer had to go out of their way to give Sony the world. If any of you have favorite Activision games outside of Call of Duty that end up skipping PlayStation in the coming years, it will be because Sony's aggressive posturing ended up backfiring on them.

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For the 100th time, Microsoft did the same shite with COD back when PlayStation sucked. Marketing deal, timed DLC, whole 9 yards. Nobody cared back then though, just like I don’t care now.

Doesn't change the facts of the current market, and isn't really relevant to the reasons Microsoft chose to purchase Activision (which are largely due to mobile gaming, in reality, and very little to do with console exclusives).

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Youre projecting your views and analyses from that stupid frickin trial onto them. Their crying and embellishment to help prevent the deal are no different than some brokedick embellishing his back injuries for a payout in a fender bender.

Not talking about testimony. Talking about internal documents filed under discovery. If we were talking about testimony though, I find it very hard to believe Sony execs would have lied under oath over this deal. It ain't worth going to jail for. What happened in that court case is the most accurate information available to us about internal goings on at all three major gaming companies and I believe it would be totally worth any gamer's time to go back and watch that/read the materials that came out.

Truthfully, I don't think Sony's really even being honest with themselves. I think they're clearly scared of Game Pass getting Call of Duty. Call of Duty on Game Pass on day and date of release, even without it being an XBox exclusive, will be a hit to Sony's bottom line. Internal Sony documents discussed in the links above showed that "[14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty." We're talking about a potential 21 million gamer shift JUST for Call of Duty.

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Again, totally fine to think this. That’s not the consensus of the general gaming public though.

Sony disagrees. They are even scared of Call of Duty "running better" on XBox than it does on PlayStation and believe that even that scenario (without exclusivity) would cause immense harm to the PlayStation. They do not have faith in their exclusives carrying the PlayStation.

This post was edited on 9/25/23 at 12:43 pm