Call of Duty Being Xbox Exclusive Would be Unprofitable for Microsoft
Microsoft does not intend to take the Call of Duty brand away from PlayStation console owners. The company explains that such a move would be unprofitable.
At the beginning of the year, Microsoft announced plans to acquire Activision's Blizzard. Immediately, questions arose about which of the publisher's brands would become titles exclusive to PC and Xbox consoles. We now know that such a fate will not befall the Call of Duty series.
- The source of this information is a document that Microsoft sent to the Brazilian Administrative Council for Economic Defense agency (CADE), the body charged with ensuring an adequate level of competition in the country's market.
- In the document, Microsoft explains that making the Call of Duty brand exclusive to Xbox consoles would be unprofitable.
- It says that dropping the PlayStation version would result in too much loss of players, which would not be made up for by an increase in the number of people playing these games on Xbox consoles.
- It also comments on Sony's publicly expressed its concerns. In this regard, Microsoft lightly mocked the competition, claiming that the PlayStation console maker was concerned about the impact on the industry in a situation where CoD would be made an Xbox exclusive brand, yet it is well known that the Japanese corporation's entire development strategy is based on exclusives.
- Microsoft also claims that even if it eventually managed to find a way to make CoD viable without a PlayStation version, it would still be nothing new in the industry, so Brazilian authorities have no reason to worry that it would negatively affect the situation of the entire game market.
It is worth mentioning that during the announcement of the decision to buy Activision Blizzard, Microsoft assured that all the publisher's earlier agreements would be kept. Some of them involve cooperation with Sony, so there was no concern that in the near future Call of Duty will disappear from PlayStation consoles. Doubts arise only in the longer term, and it is these that Microsoft wanted to dispel in the document sent to CADE.
Recall that the next installment of the series will be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. The game will debut on October 28, this year, simultaneously on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
