Today in Brussels, I watched Microsoft president Brad Smith produce a copy of the agreement he still hopes Sony will sign: a contract to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation and remove the concerns of Xbox’s biggest rival from blocking its $68.7bn Activision Blizzard buyout.
But even as the Microsoft exec waved his piece of A4 aloft, Sony’s disagreement over the deal remained a major sticking point in getting the acquisition past regulators here in Europe, in the UK, and in the US.
And despite my summons by Microsoft to Brussels – the site of a meeting today between it, the EU, Sony and other interested partners – for an update on the deal, I was left with a feeling we’d been fed a sandwich of agreements which seemed like bread with little filling.
This morning, Microsoft reiterated what we essentially knew already – that Nintendo, through lack of interest or genuine optimism at getting Call of Duty on its hardware – was not going to be an issue to Xbox getting its deal done.
This evening, journalists were told that Nvidia, the company behind Microsoft’s PC cloud gaming rival, had also been brought on board. In total, Smith said, that meant 150m more devices now had access to Call of Duty.
But what about this afternoon? What about Sony? When pressed on how the meeting with PlayStation boss Jim Ryan had gone, Brad Smith declined to go into real detail.
Instead, we got that flourish of a contract: unsigned, hopeful, expectant. Was today meant to convince Sony that, with Nintendo and Nvidia on board, its own acceptance of the deal was now inevitable? To be fair, it always seemed unlikely today’s meeting between Xbox and PlayStation would result in a breakthrough.