Call Of Duty almost stopped releasing on Xbox years ago
Topics: Call Of Duty, Activision, Xbox, Microsoft
Featured Image Credit: Activision, Billy Freeman via Unsplash
Topics: Call Of Duty, Activision, Xbox, Microsoft
For the last year or so, it seems that all anyone has been able to talk about is Xbox potentially owning Call of Duty, and consequently, what that would mean for both the franchise and games industry as a whole.
This is all because of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, of course. The $68.7 billion dollar deal has been under heavy scrutiny by regulators for months, and Microsoft has recently been engaged in a court battle against the U.S.’ Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in an attempt to justify that the buyout would be fair. During this debate, TweakTown reports that Xbox's corporate vice president, Sarah Bond, revealed that the Call of Duty series was almost stopped from releasing on Xbox’s new-gen consoles in the first place.
Take a look at some of the funniest wins and fails from the original Call of Duty: Warzone below.
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Reportedly, in her testimony, Bond revealed that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick had refused to bring Call of Duty to Xbox Series X/S unless Xbox agreed to a certain revenue split deal. For context, the typical revenue split is 70-30, which means that publishers (in this case, Activision) get 70% cut of software sales, while platform holders (Xbox, in this instance) get the remaining 30%.
“It was clear that Call of Duty would be on PS5 and that would not have been good if it was not also on Xbox if it was launching at the same time,” Bond stated (via TweakTown). “It was clear if we did not move beyond the standard [revenue] share, he would not place Call of Duty on Xbox.”
Bond allegedly claimed that until Xbox agreed to the deal, the Call of Duty devs refused to use the Series X/S dev kits, which would have eventually meant that no Call of Duty games would have been ready for the new-gen consoles’ launch if Xbox didn't agree quickly enough.
Obviously, Xbox must have agreed to the deal in the end, but it’s not clear what revenue split was settled on. Reportedly, the FTC accidentally mentioned an 80-20 split at one point during proceedings, but this might not have been the actual deal.