Microsoft believes a decade is enough for Sony to develop its own competitor to Call of Duty for PlayStation.

Have you ever heard of the term redacted? Well, Microsoft recently made pretty heavy use of it while responding to UK’s regulatory authority CMA. Coming as no surprise, it is in relation to the ongoing tussle between the Xbox maker and PS giant Sony over COD and its future going forward.

Microsoft published a document asserting that its deal with Activision will give a great opportunity to Sony. Only if they accept the 10-year deal with the Xbox maker for Call of Duty. In case that happens, the gaming community might end up witnessing a giant rival to Activision’s undisputed FPS IP. But is it going to be the case in reality?

Sony may or may not develop a rival to Call of Duty (if it accepts Microsoft’s COD offer)

In case anyone missed keeping track of events, Microsoft revealed last year that it offered a deal to Sony for COD. During this time, the franchise’s title would remain on PS consoles for a decade. But Sony didn’t accept the offer at all. Instead, it increased the efforts to block the $68.8 billion deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.

Recently, Microsoft came up with a new document in order to win the trust of UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. To be precise, the company responded to CMA’s Remedies Hearing. The authority had asked the Xbox maker to provide inputs on the issues concerning the Activision deal.

READ MORE: Microsoft Makes It Clear. No Call of Duty, No Activision Deal!

Going by what Microsoft has mentioned in the document, it believes that if Sony accepts the 10-year offer regarding Call of Duty, it will have enough time to create its own IP to compete against the FPS series. “Microsoft considers that a period of 10 years is sufficient for Sony, as a leading publisher and console platform, to develop alternatives to CoD,” reads a section from the document. But the big question is: will Sony actually do that?

Here’s why Sony won’t take the massive risk

It seems highly unlikely, given the fact of how much it’s trying to block the ambitious merger. One can say that the PlayStation giant is not willing to give up on Call of Duty so easily. That’s why even a deal worth a decade is proving to be insufficient for the company. It’s probably because COD generates a lot of revenue for PlayStation, thanks to record sales every year.

So much so, that even Sony’s first-party titles can’t match Activision’s IP in terms of enormous influence over the customers. But this is just a theory explaining why it won’t actually accept Microsoft’s offer in order to build its own game to compete against COD.

Yes, Sony has endless resources and developers to work on such a project (if it gets green-lit). However, even if it manages to accomplish this mission, it may take at least another 10 years for the hypothetical COD rival to win over the existing millions of loyal fans of Activision’s long-running franchise.

What are your thoughts on this entire situation? Will Sony really try to challenge Call of Duty’s might in the future if it fails to block the $68.7 billion deal? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Microsoft’s published document

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