Activision Blizzard mocks Sony

An Activision Blizzard executive posted a meme on Twitter targeting Sony for losing the Call of Duty deal to Microsoft.

Microsoft employees have now made fun of this. Activision Blizzard CCO Lulu Cheng Meservey tweeted about Microsoft’s recent partnership with Call of Duty.

When executives post memes

The meme contains three images, the first with a person riding a bicycle. The second then the same person who was on the bike with the caption “refuses to accept guaranteed long-term access to CoD.” The third then has the person who fell off the bike with the words “what if we lose access to COD”.

This setback is just another example and development in the drama surrounding Microsoft’s deal with Activision/Blizzard and Sony’s rejection of the deal. Earlier in February, we reported that new claims indicated that Sony had halted talks about merging with Activision.

The meme comes after Meservey also fired back at Sony for trying to stop the future merger. She tweeted:

“Microsoft is doing exactly what they said they’d do. Whereas Sony continues to rebuff the opportunity to get a long-term agreement for Call of Duty and is trying to undermine the deal to protect its two-decade dominance in gaming.”

“We’re confident regulators will find that our proposed merger will promote competition and create more opportunities for workers and better games for our players.”

Sony wants to prevent merger

Sony remains opposed to Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard despite the recent meeting between the two companies in Brussels. But Microsoft has reached an agreement with Nvidia, according to which Xbox games will be published on Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud service. This includes Activision Blizzard games (and Call of Duty) if the deal goes through.

The companies then faced the European Commission and Microsoft tried to convince the European regulator to approve the deal. Microsoft’s Brad Smith has argued that with the merger, more players would have access to CoD.

The regulator then suggested that the company could sell part of Activision Blizzard, such as the Call of Duty franchise, to get the deal approved. This was proposed by the British regulator CMA, but Microsoft rejected it. In a statement, Activision Blizzard added the following:

“The European Commission’s mission is to protect European consumers, not the world leader. Sony is trying to undermine that goal in order to protect its two-decade dominance in video games. We are quite confident that regulators will find that our proposed merger will increase competition and create greater opportunities for workers and better games for our players.”

We’ll see how the whole drama unfolds.

Header: Activision