A Delivery Truck Travels 21 Blocks North

A footnote in Microsoft’s submission
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to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authorization (CMA) has let slip the reason backside Phone call of Duty’s absence from the Xbox Game Pass library: Sony and Activision Blizzard have a deal that restricts the games’ presence on the service.

The footnote appears in a section detailing the potential benefits to consumers (from Microsoft’south point of view) of the Activision Blizzard catalogue coming to Game Laissez passer. In it, Microsoft says that it plans to honour “existing contractual obligations that Activision Blizzard may have with other platforms” in the outcome of its $68 billion acquisition
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going frontward.

What existing contractual obligations are those? Why, ones like the “agreement betwixt Activision Blizzard and Sony,” that places “restrictions on the power of Activision Blizzard to place COD titles on Game Pass for a number of years”. It was manifestly these kinds of agreements that Xbox’s Phil Spencer had in listen
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when he spoke to Sony bosses in January and confirmed Microsoft’s “intent to honour all existing agreements upon acquisition of Activision Blizzard”.

Unfortunately, the footnote ends in that location, so there’southward not much in the fashion of item nearly what these restrictions are or how long they’d remain in effect in a potential mail-acquisition world. Given COD’s continued non-appearance on Game Pass, you lot’ve got to imagine the restrictions are adequately significant if they’re not an outright cake on COD coming to the service. Either way, the elementary fact that Microsoft is apparently willing to maintain whatever restrictions on its own power to put first-party games on Game Pass is rather remarkable, given that making Game Pass more than appealing is ane of the reasons for its acquisition spree.

The irony of Sony making deals similar this ane while fretting nearly COD’s hereafter on PlayStation probably isn’t lost on Microsoft’s lawyers, which is no dubiety part of why they brought it up to the CMA. While information technology’s absolutely reasonable to worry about a world in which more and more properties are concentrated in the hands of singular, giant megacorps, it does await a flake odd if you’re complaining about losing access to games while stopping them from joining competing services.

Nosotros’ll detect out if the CMA agrees when information technology completes its in-depth, “Phase ii” investigation
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into the Activision Blizzard acquisition, which is some style off yet. For at present, we’ll have to content ourselves with poring over these kinds of corporate submissions for more interesting tidbits like this one. So far, we’ve already learned that Microsoft privately has a gloomy forecast for the future of cloud gaming
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