The soap opera between Microsoft and Sony in their video game division is already known to be going on for a long time. In fact, the “funniest” thing -and we are putting it in quotation marks- is that every week we receive new information about Xbox and PlayStation, as the different regulatory bodies are still mediating the purchase of Activision Blizzard for almost 70 billion dollars. And yes, the centerpiece of all this is Call of Duty.
During last December we learned that Microsoft had offered Sony that Call of Duty would be in the PlayStation Plus service from day 1. In this way, the game would be from the beginning in the subscription system, something similar to what it will do in Xbox Game Pass when the occasion arises (everything points to be from the beginning; otherwise it would be a surprise).
This information in the previous paragraph was a leak, but now we know that it is for real. Thanks to documents submitted by Sony to the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) we have learned that the problem lies in the cost of the license. According to the Japanese, the fact is not that it appears in PlayStation Plus, but that in case of doing so would have to pay a high price for the license of Call of Duty, which would force to raise the price of the PlayStation Plus subscription. For this reason, Sony has not signed such a deal, nor has it signed a 10-year PlayStation Plus deal.
And on the other hand, Sony also indicates that Microsoft could release defective Call of Duty games to harm them: “Quickly detecting any anomaly in terms of technical or graphic quality compromise and ensuring that it complies would be quite a challenge. For example, Microsoft could release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where crashes and bugs appear only in the late game or after subsequent updates. Even if these detriments could be detected quickly, any fix would likely come too late, and by then the gaming community would have lost confidence in PlayStation as the place to play Call of Duty”.
The case of Nintendo
It is curious that this agreement to bring Call of Duty to other platforms has been signed by Nintendo. The Japanese have reached a decade of agreement, as is well known, and from Microsoft point out that even the current games could come to Nintendo Switch if they were to propose it.
Although everything points to Call of Duty coming out on future Nintendo consoles, from Xbox they highlight that deliveries such as Call of Duty: Warzone or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 could appear on Nintendo Switch. They consider that if both titles are capable of running on a 2015 graphics card, Nintendo’s console could also. This all refers to being played natively, i.e. without the cloud or similar.
The information has become known thanks to a document provided to the regular agencies. In this, in addition to the above, it is also stressed that Activision has a “long history of optimization” in their video games, so it would be trusted in that team.
