The peculiar implications of the legal battle between Microsoft, Activision, FTC and Sony into which the celebrated acquisition of Activision Blizzard has turned, now with Sony considering “obvious harassment” her requests for data and information by Microsoft.
As had previously emerged, Microsoft is suing Sony, requesting the appearance of company representatives in the lawsuit brought by the FTC against the Redmond house. The purpose of this move is to have a way to provide a more complete picture of the situation of the gaming market, in order to show the antitrust the actual data of the sales and market shares of the various companies in order to demonstrate the inconsistency of the risk of monopoly or restriction of competition following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
We have also seen that Sony is refusing to provide these documents, trying to delay sending them as much as possible, in order to provide a further obstacle to the conclusion of the maneuver, which Bobby Kotick has already defined as a sort of sabotage of the operation .
Coming to its fourth request for delay within a few days, Microsoft presented the matter to the judge: “Microsoft has made a reasonable request to SIE to collect documents, through the responsible already agreed through various points during the negotiations, including in written requests the January 26 and January 31,” wrote the Redmond house. “SIE has rejected these requests and, as far as we know, Sony has not completed the collection for a single subject, not even for people like the president and CEO Jim Ryanwho traveled the world to oppose the Microsoft/Activision deal and whose role in this lawsuit has never been questioned.”
Sony responded that Microsoft’s request concerns “a large volume of documents”, involving seven people, and that “finding, processing, checking and producing” these documents is “very demanding“. The house of PlayStation has gone so far as to report that “Requests for review against the leadership of SIE are obvious harassment”, which would not even be requested in internal lawsuits of the company.
In short, the question still remains open and seems far from a solution, with the rift between Microsoft and Sony that seems absolutely incurable at this point, as also reported by Jez Corden in the past few hours.
