Sony today issued new and highly controversial statements regarding its Xbox Activision deal, as it said it was confident the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) would block the deal.

The UK regulator recently widened its investigation into the nearly $70 billion acquisition due to a number of antitrust concerns, it said in a statement released last October.

And through a newly published response to the CMA's statement (citing VGC), Sony has expressed confidence that the CMA will conclude that this merger (the Xbox Activision deal) is likely to significantly reduce competition and therefore should block it.

Sony claims that if Microsoft has full and exclusive control over Activision's content, it will be detrimental to all independent developers, while Microsoft can raise prices for games, devices, and subscriptions based on this monopoly.

Sony has stated that Call of Duty is irreplaceable and that Microsoft's ownership of it will tilt the balance of power so dramatically in its favor that PlayStation may eventually be unable to compete.

Microsoft will control the irreplaceable content that drives users to it. Microsoft will then control Activision’s games, which will drive twice as many user engagements on PlayStation platforms as all of SIE’s top-performing first-party titles combined.

While Microsoft recently said it offered Sony a deal that would keep the Call of Duty series on PlayStation platforms for at least 10 years, Sony claims that following the deal, Microsoft will have the ability and incentive to exclude or limit competition, including by blocking users of its PlayStation and PlayStation Plus consoles from accessing Call of Duty.

According to Sony's statement, the CMA has collected information showing that Activision and Microsoft games account for 30-40% of all minutes played on consoles in the UK. It said:

In the medium term, it is likely that a large number of PlayStation users will switch to Xbox or Game Pass. Microsoft may increase the prices of consoles and games for Xbox users, including those who have switched from PlayStation; in addition to increasing the price of Game Pass; reducing innovation and quality.

This will largely prevent Sony from competing for the business of a large portion of home console gamers, which reduces its incentives to invest.

It is worth noting that the Capital Markets Authority has set a deadline of March 1, 2023 to publish the results of its in-depth investigation into the deal with Xbox Activision.