Today, Microsoft held a press conference in Brussels, during which they again tried to make the case that their proposed $69 billion purchase of Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard should be allowed to go forward. The objections of regulators in the EU, UK, and US have largely hinged on whether the deal will restrict access to Call of Duty and Microsoft made a couple of moves today to ease concerns on that front, including signing a 10-year contract to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo systems and announcing that Xbox games, including CoD, will be playable on NVIDIA’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service should the deal go through. Per Microsoft, these moves will make Call of Duty available to 150 million more players than before.
In addition to the Nintendo and NVIDIA deals, Microsoft spent much of their press conference trying to reframe themselves as the underdog in this fight. Microsoft president Brad Smith referred to Sony as a “super dominant” company (thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for the transcript) in the gaming space and shared some rather interesting stats. According to Smith, PlayStation outsold Xbox by a 69-to-31 ratio this past holiday season. In Europe, the PlayStation/Xbox split is 80/20, in Japan it’s 94/6, and globally, if you take Nintendo out of the mix, Sony has a 70 percent share of the market.
It’s a fair point, to a degree – Sony is a bigger player than Microsoft when it comes to gaming. That said, there’s a lot of asterisks to take into account here. Like the fact that all these figures shared by Smith completely ignore Nintendo, which is the actual console gaming market leader right now, with over 120 million Switches sold. Of course that complicates the “Sony is completely dominant” narrative. Microsoft’s framing also ignores the fact that Xbox is just one small division of the company, which, as a whole, completely dwarfs Sony. Only Microsoft has the money to buy a company like Activision Blizzard.
Microsoft’s press conference followed closed-door hearings with the European Commission, which were also attended by Sony and other companies. Apparently, Microsoft’s arguments didn’t convince Sony, as Smith confirmed a deal between the two companies hadn’t been struck. That said, there are also things Microsoft isn’t willing to bend on, as Smith said removing Call of Duty from the equation so they could buy the rest of Activision Blizzard wouldn’t be “feasible or realistic.”
The European Commission has until April 11 to come to a decision on the Activision Blizzard purchase. We’ll of course keep you updated on further developments in this story.
