Sony’s current Call of Duty marketing deal “restricts” Activision’s big-budget shooter series from appearing in Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft has claimed.
The detail comes from Xbox’s full response to last week’s filing by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, in which the regulator raised its current concerns regarding Microsoft’s ongoing $68bn takeover attempt of Activision Blizzard.
Sony’s existing marketing deal with Call of Duty sees the PlayStation branding used in conjunction with advertising, while players on Sony platforms get early access to in-game content.
In Microsoft’s response, in a footnote to the main text, the Xbox maker references Phil Spencer’s January 20th 2022 tweet which stated that Microsoft’s intent was “to honour all existing agreements upon acquisition of Activision Blizzard”.
Microsoft here goes on to state that the current agreement with Activision Blizzard and Sony “includes restrictions on the ability of Activision Blizzard to place Call of Duty titles on Game Pass for a number of years”.
What we don’t know is the nature of these “restrictions”, and whether they amount to a full block of a Call of Duty game’s launch on Game Pass, or whether doing so would come at some kind of penalty to Activision Blizzard – such as compensation for users claiming or downloading copies, which it would then pass on to Sony.