And, just as I feared, the wheels of monopoly and extreme exclusivity are quickly turning. With Microsoft defeating the FTC in their $70B Activision purchase, they have now forced Sony to sign a 10-year binding deal to keep Call of Duty on the PlayStation.
Get ready to only play 50% of your favorite games on one platform (and vice versa the other) as that’s exactly where we’re heading.
Sony has been forced to give up their exclusivity demands and come to the negotiating table with Microsoft as the two giants reached a legally binding, 10-year agreement to keep Call of Duty, Activision’s most popular gaming title, on both platforms with the $70B purchase of Activision now nearing its completion. And, if you couldn’t tell, I hate the road gaming has taken.
Now, before I get into the meat and bones of this topic, let me just say that I’m no fanboy or ardent defender of Sony and PlayStation as if the tables where reversed and Sony was the one buying Activision, I’d be 1,000% against them. But it just so happens that Sony’s attempted exclusivity deal with Activision over Call of Duty failed and Microsoft came with the big bucks to buy the entirety of the gaming studio.
So, back to the topic at hand, it was pretty clear that Sony, despite being the biggest opponent of Microsoft’s $70B Activision Blizzard purchase and seeing their CEO Jim Ryan say, “I want to block (Microsoft’s) merger”, would have to come groveling back to the negotiating table and accept whatever deal Microsoft imposed upon them to ensure Call of Duty would still be made for the PlayStation once Microsoft won the FTC battle.
With Call of Duty having sold 425M+ copies, occupying four of the Top-50 highest selling game spots, and generating over $30B of lifetime revenue for Activision Blizzard, losing this franchise would send a horrific shockwave for Sony and PlayStation given the sheer amount of popularity this game has. The game is a literal gold mine for console sales, and it was about to get exclusively sold to Sony’s biggest competitors.
That just couldn’t happen for the survival of the PlayStation and Jim Ryan had to relent from his “no Activision Blizzard merger” hardline stance and negotiate…which he did.
Nevertheless, even if Call of Duty is going to be on PlayStation, you can forget about the other massive Activision IPs, such as Diablo and Overwatch, staying on the platform for much longer as the shared rights to these games was not included in the agreement. Only Call of Duty will stay on PlayStation, not any other Activision Blizzard title.
This deal is essentially a massive game of monopoly between Sony and Microsoft over the gaming world being played in front of our eyes in real time as with Bethesda and Activision going to Microsoft today, you can be damned sure a major gaming studio will be heading to Sony tomorrow.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Sony uses some of its $88B revenue streams from 2022 to purchase a studio like Ubisoft ($3.6B net worth), Capcom ($8.5B net worth), Bandi Namco/FromSoftware ($7B net worth), Sega ($4.8B), CD Projekt Red ($4B net worth), or some like that with famous IPs and mergeable valuations to take games away from Xbox.
Or it could ramp up its exclusivity deals with these studios to take away the major IP releases from Microsoft and have them only on PlayStation. And then the pendulum will swing back to Microsoft and then back to Sony in a never-ending loop until the entire gaming world is dominated by these two companies.
I really hope that isn’t the case and Activision games still come out on 3rd party platforms, such as PlayStation, Steam, etc., but I don’t believe it’ll happen. I think it’s only going to get more monopolistic before this gets better.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Microsoft/Activision Blizzard) (Official Reveal Trailer | Call of Duty: Modern Warfare – YouTube)
