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A12 BUSINESS
Friday 28 OctOber 2022

Call of Duty’s latest battle is between

Microsoft and Sony

By MATT O’BRIEN
AP Technology Writer
Hunting down your ene-
mies on the bustling streets
of Amsterdam, along the
U.S.-Mexico border or in a
Middle Eastern fishing vil-
lage is just part of the in-
tense action in the latest
Call of Duty video game.
The Friday release of Call
of Duty: Modern Warfare
2 continues a nearly two-
decade run for California-
based Activision Blizzard’s
wildly popular military A man wears a bulletproof vest that is mapped in a
shooting game franchise. photogrammetry room for the video game series Call of Duty on
New installments of the Friday, Oct. 21, 2022, at Activision Blizzard, Infinity Ward Division,
game can rival Holly- in Woodland Hills, Calif.
wood’s biggest blockbust- Associated Press
ers in how much they earn
on their opening weekend.
But the battle this time is game title. “It’s always tough when
Among those listening to
you have something this
also happening off-screen.
Call of Duty is at the center Sony’s concerns are an- popular and everybody’s
got an opinion on what it
titrust regulators in the
of a corporate tug-of-war
between Microsoft’s Xbox United Kingdom who last should be, what it shouldn’t
be,” said Jack O’Hara, the
month escalated their in-
and Sony’s PlayStation
over Microsoft’s pending vestigation into whether game’s director.
Work on Modern Warfare
Microsoft could make Call
$69 billion purchase of Ac-
tivision Blizzard. of Duty and other titles ex- 2 started before the COV-
clusive to its Xbox platform
ID-19 pandemic shuttered
“Microsoft would have full
ownership of one of the or “otherwise degrade its Infinity Ward’s headquar-
rivals’ access” by delaying
ters outside of Los Ange-
most valuable franchises
in console gaming,” said releases or imposing licens- les, forcing developers to
be more creative in how
ing price increases.
Joost van Dreunen, a lec-
turer on the business of “These titles require thou- they drew the game’s
characters,
weaponry,
sands of game developers
games at New York Univer-
sity’s Stern School of Busi- and several years to com- motions and scenery and
plete, and there are very
recorded its voices. It was
ness. “And naturally, Sony
does not want that or like few other games of similar the same studio that in
2003 launched the original
calibre or popularity,” said
that because it will cost
them business.” a September report from Call of Duty, a first-person
shooter set during World
the UK’s Competition and
Microsoft has been work-
ing to get approval from Markets Authority. War II. Mark Grigsby, the
At the Southern California
studio’s animation direc-
antitrust regulators in the
U.S., Europe and elsewhere studios of Infinity Ward, the tor, first joined in 2005. He
division of Activision Bliz-
said he was feeling “a
to complete its January
agreement to acquire the zard responsible for cre- little bit of anxiety” ahead
ating the new game, the
of Friday’s release about
video game giant. But it’s
been trailed around the Microsoft-Sony fight has how players would react
been secondary to game
to tweaks affecting the
world by objections from
Sony, which is afraid of los- developers’ more pressing feel of the virtual weapons
they’re carrying, such as
worries about making sure
ing access to what it de-
scribes as a “must-have” their newest release satis- how they recoil after a shot
fies legions of diehard fans. is fired. “Every iteration of
the product, you’re never
able to get everything that
you wanted to do done in
that one edition. So you’re
always trying to up your
game,” Grigsby said. “It
takes an army and a tal-
ented army.”
The games have gradu-
ally grown more visually
realistic, interactive and
multiplayer in the past two
decades.q