In a surprising turn of events that no one saw coming, EA’s Battlefield series has found itself dragged through the mud just for existing and ending up in the middle of Sony and Microsoft’s back and forth over the Activision Blizzard buyout.
It seems like every day something new is being brought up, questioned, scrutinised or dissected with this buyout, and today is no different. As part of new documents released by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, Sony starts out saying that the Call of Duty series is not replaceable, a pretty fair statement to make.
However, Sony then picks on poor Battlefield seemingly out of nowhere by stating that the Battlefield series cannot keep up.
“Call of Duty is too entrenched for any rival, no matter how well equipped, to catch up. It has been the top-selling game for almost every year in the last decade and, in the first-person shooter genre, it is overwhelmingly the top-selling game. Other publishers do not have the resources or expertise to match its success.
To give a concrete example, Electronic Arts – one of the largest third-party developers after Activision – has tried for many years to produce a rival to Call of Duty with its Battlefield series. Despite the similarities between Call of Duty and Battlefield… the Battlefield franchise cannot keep up,” says Sony.
Sony wasn’t the only one throwing stones. In the latest document, Microsoft also decided to step up and downplay the importance of the Call of Duty franchise by saying that the series is consistently outranked in user polls and industry reviews compared to Sony’s output and that Call of Duty does not drive social media conversations.
Microsoft also stated that Sony has more exclusive games, many of which are better quality than its own.