The FTC’s lawsuit to try to block the Activision Blizzard acquisition may end up with an unexpected result. Yesterday we learned that Sony will be forced to share a lot of information due to the investigation that the Judge in the case, Michael Chappell, is currently carrying out. Well, in the last few hours it has been pointed out that this information could affect the deals that are aimed at ban games from coming to Xbox Game Pass.
This has been pointed out by The Verge, confirming the information revealed by Kotaku in which it was assured that Chappell has sided with Microsoft in terms of the documents that the Japanese company should provide in recent years. Well, precisely among those documents could be present the payments that Sony has made with the aim of prohibiting games from reaching Xbox Game Pass, something that came to light with Resident Evil Village.
We could know how much Sony pays to prohibit games from reaching Xbox Game Pass
This decision has come after Microsoft will accuse Sony of paying to use these blocking rightssomething that powerfully drew Judge Chappell’s attention, to the point of ensuring that “The nature and scope of SIE’s content license agreements are relevant to the claims of the exclusivity agreement lawsuit between game console developers and game developers and publishers.”.
Microsoft alleges that the lawsuit in this case makes a series of allegations regarding exclusivity agreements between developers of high-performance video game consoles and video game publishers. Microsoft states that it is aware that SIE requires many third-party publishers to agree to exclusivity provisions, including prohibiting publishers from placing their games on Xbox’s multi-game subscription service, and that it understands the full scope of exclusivity agreements. SIE’s exclusivity and its effect on industry competitiveness will help defend it.
Thus, It seems that the FTC is positioned in part in favor of Microsoft, and it will be necessary to see if it will finally be something that occurs in the ruling of the matter. There are still months for this to happen, but with the European Union Commission giving its approval to the operation, everything seems to indicate that the purchase of Activision Blizzard will come to fruition.