Microsoft Says It "Wouldn't Be Profitable" To Make COD Xbox Exclusive

Back when Microsoft announced its planned acquisition of Activision, and people realised quite how many big IPs it’d be set to own if the deal goes through, the question on many gamers’ minds was whether or not Call of Duty would become an Xbox exclusive franchise. Although it was reported that the next three CoD games would remain on PlayStation, even Sony recently expressed concerns about whether the games would remain multi-platform in the future.

However, as reported by VGC, Microsoft has reiterated that it has no plans to make CoD an Xbox exclusive. A document which was sent to Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) regarding the planned acquisition of Activision has revealed that the company believes that the move would simply be unprofitable.

Take a look at some gameplay footage for the upcoming CoD title, Modern Warfare II, below.

“Regardless of how unsurprising Sony‘s criticism of content exclusivity is – given that PlayStation’s entire strategy has been centred on exclusivity over the years – the reality is that the strategy of retaining Activision Blizzard’s games by not distributing them in rival console shops would simply not be profitable for Microsoft,” Microsoft wrote. “Such a strategy would be profitable only if Activision Blizzard’s games were able to attract a sufficiently large number of gamers to the Xbox console ecosystem, and if Microsoft could earn enough revenue from game sales to offset the losses from not distributing such games on rival consoles.”

It continued, explaining that exclusivity strategies lead to further title-specific costs, which, combined with a predicted loss of sales, would mean Microsoft would be unable to offset the losses.

“This is especially true considering (i) the ‘gamer-centric’ – as opposed to ‘device-centric’ – strategy that Microsoft has pioneered with Game Pass, and (ii) the fact that PlayStation has the most loyal users across its various generations, with all indications that brand loyalty accrued in previous rounds of the ‘console wars’ suggesting that PlayStation will continue to have a strong market position,” it continued.

Microsoft concluded, saying that “such strategies would have no competitive impact”.