As we've already highlighted on Pure Xbox, the UK CMA recently announced it was no longer concerned about the impact of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard takeover on the console market, which led to a response from Sony suggesting the findings were "surprising, unprecedented, and irrational".
As part of this, Sony talked a little bit about the need for Call of Duty to have complete parity across Xbox and PlayStation, referencing SIE president Jim Ryan's very definitive comments at a recent Remedies Hearing:
"Any degradation in the price, performance, or quality of play on PlayStation or any delays on release would quickly harm SIE’s reputation and cause a loss of engagement and of players."
"As SIE’s CEO, Jim Ryan, explained to the CMA at the Remedies Hearing, if PlayStation received a degraded version of Call of Duty, it would “seriously damage our reputation. Our gamers would desert our platform in droves and network effects would exacerbate the problem. Our business would never recover”."
This small section of the report goes into detail about players' expectations for games such as Call of Duty, even mentioning that Digital Foundry's in-depth analysis of a title can have a "highly influential" effect on where console owners choose to play a game. Therefore, the concern is that any kind of degradation could be a deal breaker.
On Xbox's side of things, the most recent Microsoft response to the CMA mentioned that the company has "no intention to withhold or degrade access to Call of Duty", stating this would be "in direct contrast to the interests of gamers in the UK and around the world". Nevertheless, Sony and Jim Ryan still clearly have their concerns.