** UPDATE 21/01/2022 **
Xbox CEO Phil Spencer today put to bed all the speculation surrounding Call of Duty's exclusivity by announcing on Twitter that Call of Duty will in fact remain on PlayStation.
In the tweet Phil Spencer said "Had good calls this week with leaders at Sony. I confirmed our intent to honour all existing agreements upon acquisition of Activision Blizzard and our desire to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. Sony is an important part of our industry, and we value our relationship."
This sounds a lot like Xbox fully intend to keep Call of Duty a multi platform game as we suggested yesterday. We reached out to Xbox yesterday to see what this Acquisition meant for exclusivity etc and they all but confirmed this for us this morning. in this statement to us, they also said "We will offer as many Activision games as we can within Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and games from Activision Blizzard's incredible catalogue." So while PlayStation players will continue to be able to play Activision titles, it looks like most future titles will be playable for free to Xbox and PC players via Game pass.
Original Post
With todays news that Microsoft are undertaking an acquisition of Activision/Blizzard for a whopping $68.7 billion, one of the first questions on everyone’s lips was understandably, Will Call of Duty become an Xbox exclusive? And well the answer is no, at least not for the time being.
This acquisition will officially be completed in 2023, and until it does, Activision/Blizzard and of its studios will continue to operate independently. This means that the rumoured Modern Warfare 2/Call of Duty 2022, (made by Infinity Ward) will release as it normally does on all platforms.
What happens in 2023 once complete however is still relatively unknown. Microsoft’s very own press release however did allude to the fact that all of Activision/blizzards games will still be playable on the platforms they are enjoyed on now, which includes PlayStation. We have reached out to Microsoft for clarification on this but as of right now we have not received a reply. Its important to remember that Microsoft has previously purchased studios and/or IP’s and has continued to sell and support these games on both PlayStation and Nintendo the biggest example of this is Minecraft. Minecraft is a huge game and would have been a huge coup to have it as an Xbox Exclusive, however Microsoft decided against this move as it made more sense to be making money from PlayStation as well as Xbox. In a statement in 2017 Phil spencer said that the move makes Microsoft one of the largest publishers on PlayStation as well as Xbox.
According to an article from Bloomberg, Phil spencer told them that most Activision games will continue to be made and sold on PlayStation but some content will be made Xbox exclusive. What this means exactly, were not sure. But will be interesting to see.
Were purely speculating here, but we would suggest that Both Call of Duty’s yearly releases and Call of Duty Warzone will remain multi-platform, and that some of Activision/Blizzards smaller studio releases will be the Xbox exclusives. Games such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro etc.
We will update with more information as it becomes available.
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