Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard has sent ripples throughout the gaming industry. While the company hasn’t been fully purchased yet (it’s still under investigation), the deal officially going through would impact plenty of publishers, PlayStation being one of them.
Jim Ryan claims that Microsoft’s offer to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for three more years is inadequate. He said, “We want to guarantee PlayStation gamers continue to have the highest quality Call of Duty experience, and Microsoft’s proposal undermines this principle.”
Sony had previously made it clear that the company wasn’t a big fan of Microsoft acquiring Call of Duty, primarily because “Call of Duty is so popular that it influences users’ choice of console, and its network of loyal users is so entrenched that even if a competitor had the budget to develop a similar product, it would not be able to rival it.”
Frankly, Jim Ryan is right. The Call of Duty fandom is enormous and it’s hard to deny that their presence in the industry is valuable for any console. Robbing PlayStation users of Call of Duty is a cheap move, and although it could result in many players moving to the Xbox ecosystem, it also forces people to spend lots of extra money, especially if they’re big fans of the series.
Yes, Jim Ryan’s interests are certainly financial. He wants to maintain the PlayStation users who are big Call of Duty fans for the sake of the console itself. But players deserve this game series to be platform agnostic, at least for a little while longer. People who’ve invested in the PS5 with the intention of purchasing each new Call of Duty and keeping up with the series would be distraught to see it abruptly ripped away from them.
It might not seem like a big deal, but these sort of artificial buyouts to force exclusivity are almost always bad. Once the deal goes through, Xbox will always own Call of Duty, so it would be good to give PlayStation players a little more time with the series before taking it away.
