Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard is going through more hardship than perhaps some may have expected, and in an attempt to argue against regulator claims that its ownership of Call of Duty would unfairly hinder competition, the company has recently stated that PlayStation‘s exclusive games are of better quality than its own, over at Xbox.
The fair market regulators of both the EU and UK jurisdictions have expanded their investigations into deeper stages, and the CMA specifically (UK jurisdiction) has claimed, as per gamesindustry.biz, that if Call of Duty were to become an Xbox exclusive “it would impact Sony’s ability to compete with Microsoft.”
The head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, has stated again and again that the company intends to ship Call of Duty to PlayStation indefinitely following the acquisition, but both regulators and PlayStation itself have treated this claim with skepticism, pointing to Microsoft making Bethesda titles Xbox exclusives, most notably Starfield.
Sony, in its own statement to the CMA, called Call of Duty “irreplaceable” and wrote that if the franchise becomes an Xbox exclusive and is available on Game Pass, the service’s dominance would be so strong that it would harm both developers and consumers. Sony claimed that independent dev teams would have to submit to “worse terms,” since they would ostensibly be forced by the market to put their game on Game Pass. Furthermore, Xbox could also raise the prices on both its consoles and its Game Pass service, which would harm the gaming audience.
In an attempt to combat this, Microsoft decided to point out in its statement that PlayStation has more exclusives available than Xbox and that they are of “better quality.” It points to well-known first-party titles like God of War and Spider-Man, but it also lists third-party exclusives that PlayStation paid to keep off of Xbox, such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy XVI, and Silent Hill 2 Remake.
When it comes to why these games are deemed to be of “better quality” than Xbox’s, Microsoft’s references review aggregate scores, stating “the average Metacritic score for Sony’s top 20 exclusive games in 2021 was 87/100, against 80/100 for Xbox.” Microsoft finalizes this part of its argument with the following sentence, “it is implausible that Sony, the leading console with a more than 2-to-1 lead, would be foreclosed as a result of not having access to a single franchise.”
