Phil Spencer announces Call of Duty deal with PlayStation
Phil Spencer announces Call of Duty deal with PlayStation
"We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and @PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games."
https://twitter.com/XboxP3/status/1680578783718383616
No word on how long the deal is for, but my guess would be 10 years.
Not a huge deal. Microsoft has every incentive to keep Call of Duty on the market leading console. Considering we’re about halfway through this cycle based on history, that means Microsoft would have left CoD on PlayStation 5 for another 3-4 years. This deal is very obviously only happening due to the anti-trust case, and because of the aforementioned 3-4 years it basically just says “we agree to put CoD on PS6 regardless of how well it does.”
Of course, when the companies merge, no regulatory body is going to actually keep Microsoft to their word with penalties high enough to care about.
This merger is bad for the industry without a doubt in my mind.
I would argue that MS had every incentive to put Starfield out on PS5, but ultimately decided against it along with all new Zenimax games. They even estimated they would have sold 10 million copies on Playstation. I think that shows they are willing to forego money from some multiplatform games in the short term if they think they will make more money from Game Pass and Xbox hardware in the long run.
I'd argue this deal is happening now because the anti trust cases are going in Microsoft's favor. Microsoft and Sony have been in talks for a while to settle the Call of Duty on PlayStation deal but Sony probably thought it would be beneficial to hold off on this deal until the last possible moment in case it gave ammo to the FTC/CMA to stop the merger from happening.
If you go by that logic then there would be no second place console in the market, because every game would exclusively be on the number one console.
Walled garden captivity for any platform has always been anti consumer profiteering and was perfected in the mid 90s after the atari clones all passed into history.
I wonder what they got from Sony. Ideally it'd be some promises about Sony reducing exclusives themselves. Exclusives suck for everyone but the company that owns the exclusive console. I don't personally own an Xbox, but I still want Sony to cut it out with their exclusives.
Digital foundry had an interesting take on this. Cod makes more than 1 billion a year, and cost probably more each year than any other franchise to develop and maintain. If Microsoft made it an Xbox exclusive, they might cut that 1 billion dollar figure in half, and the franchise might bleed more money than MS would make selling more consoles. In fact, the franchise might go negative.
Basically, they can't afford to lose the ps5 playerbase.
I doubt any company would want to give their competitor 20-30% of their profits, so in my mind it isn't a matter of if, but a matter of when they start locking all their franchises off from PS. What will be most interesting to me will be how will they do it. Will they just drop franchises so they don't have to face the backlash for turning a franchise into an exclusive? Will they just make up a new "franchise" with a new name but similar gameplay? Will they just slowly one by one exclusive them off to try and reduce blowback? Do it all at once to get it out of the way?
This generation has already been mostly played out and I don't see large changes making a large difference, but once the next generation comes around in another 3-5 years I imagine they will want to be in a place where they can leverage all these franchises to get people excited to buy their new box over their competitors. And you do that with exclusives.
Meanwhile, Minecraft trundles on as a multiplatform title 9 years after its acquisition. 🤷
minecraft also a large number of things going for it.
- It was(is) a single game
- It was already multiplatform, and only the most suicidal company would take a game that was multiplatform and make it exclusive. Not including the backlash as players lost access to a game they paid for, but there would also be untold number of refunds that would need to be done, lawsuits (most likely) to handle, etc.
- It already had a very large (and most importantly) young userbase that they could monetize on dozens of platforms.
- If you followed the proceedings of everything that is going on you'll have read that they actually wanted to make the new minecraft legends xbox exclusive. While the emails didn't say what ended up making them change their mind, I would imagine being in a certain legal fight might have played a large role in it.
- Exceptions happen, but I imagine that exception would be the appropriate word rather than norm. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
Pull a Titanfall to Apex(bad example but you know what I mean) now you don't really have a CoD franchise. It's like Battlefield is no longer the Battlefield we remember, just the names. They can just spin up another franchise "from the legendary CoD developers, blah blah...", BUT it's not CoD.
I am willing to bet that Microsoft knows damn well how rabid the hardcore COD fans are that they wouldn't stop producing the game for a certain console, even just to sell more consoles if their own. It wouldn't be worth it.
I can't say I agree. It's more likely they see the money they'd be leaving on the table and it helps that this makes them look more amiable for future acquisitions.
Digital foundry had an interesting take on this. Cod makes more than 1 billion a year, and cost probably more each year than any other franchise to develop and maintain. If Microsoft made it an Xbox exclusive, they might cut that 1 billion dollar figure in half, and the franchise might bleed more money than MS would make selling more consoles. In fact, the franchise might go negative.
Basically, they can't afford to lose the ps5 playerbase.
Digital foundry had an interesting take on this. Cod makes more than 1 billion a year, and cost probably more each year than any other franchise to develop and maintain. If Microsoft made it an Xbox exclusive, they might cut that 1 billion dollar figure in half, and the franchise might bleed more money than MS would make selling more consoles. In fact, the franchise might go negative.
Basically, they can't afford to lose the ps5 playerbase.