The company claims that fears of turning Call of Duty into an exclusive saga are unfounded and that, in addition, doing so “would not have any competitive impact.”
Microsoft has clarified that it has no intention of making Call of Duty an exclusive saga for Xbox consoles and computers after the acquisition of Activision Blizzard , claiming that it simply “would not be profitable.” At the end of last January, a video game industry analyst assured that Microsoft would have problems closing its purchase deal with Activision Blizzard if it made the Call of Duty saga an exclusive, although it should be noted that in February the company confirmed that the aforementioned franchise and others would continue to arrive on PlayStation and Switch.
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As reported from VGC , these new comments by the company come from a document sent to the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) of Brazil in which the proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard is discussed . “Regardless of how unsurprising Sony’s criticism of content exclusivity is – given that PlayStation’s entire strategy has been focused on exclusivity over the years – the reality is that the strategy of retaining Activision Blizzard not distributing them to rival console stores would simply not be profitable for Microsoft ,” the company flatly states in the aforementioned document.
Microsoft believes that making Call of Duty an exclusive would have no competitive impact
“Such a strategy would only be profitable if Activision Blizzard’s games were able to attract a large enough number of gamers to the Xbox console ecosystem, and if Microsoft could earn enough revenue from game sales to offset losses from not distributing those games. games on rival consoles ,” he adds. “As if that weren’t enough, exclusivity strategies continue to incur costs specific to each title. Those costs, added to the previously estimated lost sales, mean that Microsoft would not be able to compensate for the losses by gaining more revenue in the Xbox ecosystem as a result of the application. of exclusivity”.
To top it off, Microsoft states in the document that even if making Call of Duty exclusive to Xbox turned out to be profitable, its implementation would have “no competitive impact” due to “intense competition in the publishing market.” of game”, mainly due to the fact that the rival consoles enjoy a high degree of fidelity on the part of the players. “In summary, the hypothetical adoption of any content deregistration strategy would not be profitable for Microsoft and, even if applied, such strategies would not have any competitive impact for the reasons described above,” the company concludes.
