PlayStation says it's afraid Microsoft might give it a deliberately sabotaged version of Call of Duty

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 soldiers and vehicles — (Image credit: Activision)

In the latest volley over the Xbox Activision deal, Sony's raising concerns that Microsoft might deliberately degrade the PlayStation versions of future Call of Duty games.

This comes from Sony's comments on the UK's Competition Markets Authority remedies notice in February, which have just been made public. As Florian Mueller of the FOSS Patents blog notes, Sony's noting some pretty incendiary concerns here.

Even if Microsoft commits to continue publishing Call of Duty on PlayStation, Sony says the company "could adopt one or several partial foreclosure strategies to impair PlayStation's competitiveness." For example, Microsoft could end up "degrading the quality and performance of Call of Duty on PlayStation compared to Xbox."

Perhaps most strikingly, Sony says "Microsoft might release a PlayStation version of Call of Duty where bugs and errors emerge only on the game’s final level or after later updates. Even if such degradations could be swiftly detected, any remedy would likely come too late, by which time the gaming community would have lost confidence in PlayStation as a go-to venue to play Call of Duty."

I'm no lawyer, but any deliberate attempt by Microsoft to make Call of Duty worse on other platforms seems unlikely. The backlash from players would be quick and severe, and the damage to Xbox's reputation would be difficult to undo. Plus, Microsoft already runs Minecraft as a multiplatform game without issues, and that one's arguably much bigger than Call of Duty.

But Sony says that even "even without an active decision on the part of Microsoft to degrade Call of Duty on PlayStation," problems could arise. "Even if Microsoft operated in good faith, it would be incentivised to support and prioritize development of the Xbox version of the game, such as by using its best engineers and more of its resources." Sony argues that it would be practically impossible for a regulatory body to monitor for that kind of infringement.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.