When Microsoft announced it planned to purchase Activision, the immediate response from many was “Is Call of Duty going to become an Xbox/PC exclusive?” At first, Sony didn’t expect it to happen, and then a little while later Microsoft said that Call of Duty would remain on PlayStation “into the future,” but there wasn’t much else besides that. However, in a new filing to the Administrative Council for Economic Defense in Brasil, Microsoft comes out and straight up says that removing Call of Duty on PlayStation wouldn’t be profitable for them. Keep reading to find out more about Microsoft’s statements on keeping Call of Duty cross-platform.
Call of Duty exclusive isn’t in the plans for Microsoft
As part of the document sent to the Administrative Council, Microsoft made several claims. For starters, it “would simply not be profitable” for Microsoft to remove Call of Duty from PlayStation, where a loyal fan base of the game resides.
Such a strategy would be profitable only if Activision Blizzard’s games were able to attract a sufficiently large number of gamers to the Xbox console ecosystem, and if Microsoft could earn enough revenue from game sales to offset the losses from not distributing such games on rival consoles.
Continuing on, Microsoft talks about how it has a “gamer-centric” view on how things play out, which is being “pioneered with Game Pass….” It’s true – Game Pass doesn’t discriminate how or where you play games, so long as the service itself is allowed by the device you’re playing on. Microsoft even said that if it made Call of Duty an Xbox/PC exclusive and it did turn out to be profitable by increasing console sales, it “would have no competitive impact” due to “the intense competition in the game publishing market.”
Microsoft also talked about how they’re not really even interested in using Call of Duty to sell more consoles, stating that “it believes the future of games is going to be through streaming and subscriptions. Call of Duty isn’t so much a reason to buy an Xbox console, but a reason to subscribe to the Game Pass subscription service.”
In the end, it looks as if Microsoft will be leaving Call of Duty on PlayStation for the foreseeable future and, most likely, indefinitely.
9to5Toys’ Take
While Microsoft has its fair share of exclusive titles, Sony has far more (though many are making their way to PC). However, it does seem like it would behoove Microsoft to leave Call of Duty on PlayStation as well as PC/Xbox because it’s consistently one of the best-selling titles for Sony’s console. And given that, Microsoft would lose a lot of revenue pulling the game off PlayStation, and one could imagine that most gamers aren’t going to sell their console just to be able to play a single game.
Plus, with Microsoft having a best-selling game on Sony’s platform, it would just give them even more leverage for Game Pass and other services as they could easily talk directly to the fan base of Sony’s console.
Sources: The Verge, Video Games Chronicle, Brazil Administrative Council
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