PlayStation Says its Worried Xbox Will Release Broken Call of Duty Ports

As part of its bid to purchase Activision Blizzard, Xbox has put guarantees in place to assure regulators that the Call of Duty franchise will release on platforms such as PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. However, PlayStation has raised a new concern in a document provided to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. In the document, PlayStation argues that Xbox could intentionally release broken and bug-ridden versions of its Call of Duty games on PS5, in order to convince fans of the series to choose the Xbox versions, instead.

"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. Indeed, as Modern Warfare II attests, Call of Duty is most often purchased in just the first few weeks of release. If it became known that the game's performance on PlayStation was worse than on Xbox, Call of Duty gamers could decide to switch to Xbox, for fear of playing their favourite game at a second-class or less competitive venue," the document reads.

Over the last year, PlayStation has made it more than clear that it wants to stop the proposed purchase from going forward. As a result, we've seen a number of arguments put forward by Sony, and some of them are less plausible than others. It's worth noting that some of Microsoft's franchises are already on PlayStation platforms, including games like Minecraft. There's no reason to believe that the company would intentionally hurt its own image by releasing buggy, broken versions of Call of Duty, especially since that would hurt a brand that they're trying to spend $68.7 billion to acquire.

It's still unclear how the UK's Competition and Markets Authority will rule on the proposed purchase of Activision Blizzard, but it's hard to imagine that this is a winning argument for PlayStation.

Do you think Xbox would release worse versions of Call of Duty on PS5? Do you think this is plausible? Let us know in the comments or share your thoughts directly on Twitter and on Hive at @Marcdachamp to talk all things gaming!

[H/T: The Verge]