PlayStation chief Jim Ryan says that Sony would be unable to tell Activision Blizzard about its next console if the Microsoft acquisition were to go through.
The news comes from a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) v. Microsoft/Activision Blizzard King deposition, reported on by Axios‘ Stephen Totilo on Twitter.
“We simply could not run the risk of a company that was owned by a direct competitor having access to that information,” says Ryan. He then went on to argue that Activision Blizzard developers would be disincentivized from making optimized titles for PlayStation hardware in a post-deal environment.
Microsoft first announced its intent to purchase the third-party gaming company in early 2022. Its stockholders approved of the record $68.7 billion acquisition (roughly $90.43 billion CAD) in April of that year.
In an FTC v MS/ABK deposition, PlayStation chief Jim Ryan said that, if deal closes, Sony couldn't tell Activision about its next console
Is then asked about Sony working with Mojang (Minecraft) after MS bought them. Discussion is redacted but Ryan says it supports this concern pic.twitter.com/M86CBm3CcY
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) June 21, 2023
Sony has been at the forefront of lobbying against the deal. The Japanese gaming giant has raised concerns over anticompetitiveness, despite Microsoft insisting that it’ll maintain PlayStation support for popular franchises such as Call of Duty.
Microsoft still has an uphill battle to fight — the deal continues to be reviewed and has received scrutiny from several government regulators.
The U.S. FTC filed a suit to attempt to halt the acquisition late last year, and U.K. regulators blocked the deal over cloud concerns in April.
The European Union, for its part, approved the acquisition in May. That same month, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published an order to temporarily limit both companies from investing in each other while the matters are unresolved.
Source: @stephentotilo Via: Polygon
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