Microsoft claims that the potential impact of Call of Duty becoming an Xbox exclusive has been overcalculated by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, with only three percent of PlayStation users likely to switch consoles.
Following its Phase 2 investigation into Microsoft’s planned $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority said last month that the deal “could harm UK gamers,” resulting in “higher prices, fewer choices, or less innovation.” Now Microsoft has claimed that the regulator has overcalculated the impact of Call of Duty becoming Xbox-exclusive, citing a YouGov survey it commissioned in January.
Only 3% of PlayStation users would switch to Xbox for Call of Duty, MS survey shows
According to a Microsoft-commissioned YouGov survey conducted in January and shared with Axios, only three percent of all PlayStation users are likely to switch consoles if Call of Duty became exclusive to Xbox, or 10.5% of users that ranked Activision’s franchise as one of their two favourites.
That’s a pretty noticeable difference from the CMA’s estimations in December, which were conducted by DJS Research and claimed that an estimated 15 percent of Call of Duty fans (players that have spent ten hours or $100 on the series in the last year) on PlayStation would switch to Xbox.
“As we have said all along: it makes zero business sense to take Call of Duty off of PlayStation,” corporate vice president of Microsoft’s competition law group Rima Alaily said. Alaily also told Axios that seeing only three percent of PlayStation users changing consoles is “too small to hurt Sony’s ability to compete and too small to make a withholding strategy profitable for Xbox.”
The CMA has until April 26th to make its final report on Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
