Activision Blizzard: "This is obviously disappointing behaviour" from Sony

It seems like more and more competition and market authorities around the world are leaning in favour of Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard. In recent weeks, we have seen both the EU and the UK signal their intention to approve the deal, and yesterday the Japanese counterpart did the same thing.

Sony has fought fiercely to block the deal and used pretty much every tool they have, including claiming that Microsoft might sabotage the PlayStation versions of Call of Duty in the future. Their harsh practices have not been appreciated by everyone and several executives at Activision Blizzard (most recently CCO Lulu Cheng Meservey on Twitter) have commented on what they consider to be unjust and unfair behaviour by Sony. A couple of hours ago, the Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick shared a new open letter to all the employees of the company, and he was surprisingly straight forward about all this, writing:

"You may have seen statements from Sony, including an argument that if this deal goes through, Microsoft could release deliberately "buggy" versions of our games on PlayStation. We all know our passionate players would be the first to hold Microsoft accountable for keeping its promises of content and quality parity. And, all of us who work so hard to deliver the best games in our industry care too deeply about our players to ever launch sub-par versions of our games. Sony has even admitted that they aren't actually concerned about a Call of Duty agreement—they would just like to prevent our merger from happening."

Kotick continued his statement by explaining that despite Sony's "obviously disappointing behaviour", Activision Blizzard will not compromise with the quality of PlayStation games in the future:

"This is obviously disappointing behaviour from a partner for almost thirty years, but we will not allow Sony's behaviour to affect our long term relationship. PlayStation players know we will continue to deliver the best games possible on Sony platforms as we have since the launch of PlayStation."

Do you think Sony has handled this deal in a good way, or should they have acted differently?