Redbubble Sent Me The Wrong Item

A footnote in Microsoft’s submission
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to the UK’s Competition and Markets Potency (CMA) has permit slip the reason behind Call of Duty’south absenteeism from the Xbox Game Pass library: Sony and Activision Blizzard take a bargain that restricts the games’ presence on the service.

The footnote appears in a department detailing the potential benefits to consumers (from Microsoft’s bespeak of view) of the Activision Blizzard catalogue coming to Game Pass. In it, Microsoft says that it plans to accolade “existing contractual obligations that Activision Blizzard may take with other platforms” in the event of its $68 billion acquisition
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going frontwards.

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

Unfortunately, the footnote ends there, then at that place’s not much in the way of detail almost what these restrictions are or how long they’d remain in effect in a potential post-acquisition world. Given COD’s continued non-appearance on Game Pass, you lot’ve got to imagine the restrictions are adequately pregnant if they’re not an outright block on COD coming to the service. Either fashion, the simple fact that Microsoft is apparently willing to maintain any restrictions on its own ability to put first-party games on Game Laissez passer is rather remarkable, given that making Game Pass more highly-seasoned is one of the reasons for its acquisition spree.

The irony of Sony making deals like this 1 while fretting about COD’s future on PlayStation probably isn’t lost on Microsoft’s lawyers, which is no doubtfulness function of why they brought information technology upwardly to the CMA. While it’south absolutely reasonable to worry about a world in which more and more properties are concentrated in the hands of singular, behemothic megacorps, information technology does look a bit odd if you lot’re complaining most losing access to games while stopping them from joining competing services.

Nosotros’ll find 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 way off yet. For at present, we’ll take 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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