Microsoft has reportedly told the UK’s anti-trust regulator that the potential impact of Call of Duty’s exclusivity to Xbox platforms has been overestimated.

The Xbox firm commissioned a YouGov survey in January, which found that only 3% of all PlayStation players would switch to Xbox if Call of Duty was made exclusive to Xbox. This contradicts the study conducted by DJS Research in December 2022 on behalf of the CMA, which claimed that around 15% of “avid Call of Duty PlayStation players” would switch to Xbox.

Rima Alaily, the corporate VP of Microsoft’s Competition Law Group, said that Call of Duty was “too small to hurt Sony’s ability to compete and too small to make a withholding strategy profitable for Xbox.”

Microsoft has repeatedly stated that it makes no business sense to take Call of Duty off of PlayStation. In addition to this, Microsoft announced last month that it had signed a 10-year legal agreement to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms should the merger be approved. The company also confirmed a 10-year partnership with Nvidia to bring Xbox PC games, including Call of Duty, to the cloud gaming service GeForce Now.

Furthermore, Microsoft recently claimed that it had offered Sony a 10-year, legally enforceable contract to make each new Call of Duty game available on PlayStation the same day it comes to Xbox, with full content and feature parity.

Despite Sony’s refusal to accept the offer, Microsoft President Brad Smith said last week that he remains hopeful of striking a deal with PlayStation. The CMA’s final report ruling on the Activision Blizzard deal is expected to be released by 26 April, one day after the new EU deadline.