“We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and @PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games.”

https://twitter.com/XboxP3/status/1680578783718383616

No word on how long the deal is for, but my guess would be 10 years.

  • evilviper@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    I doubt any company would want to give their competitor 20-30% of their profits, so in my mind it isn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when they start locking all their franchises off from PS. What will be most interesting to me will be how will they do it. Will they just drop franchises so they don’t have to face the backlash for turning a franchise into an exclusive? Will they just make up a new “franchise” with a new name but similar gameplay? Will they just slowly one by one exclusive them off to try and reduce blowback? Do it all at once to get it out of the way?

    This generation has already been mostly played out and I don’t see large changes making a large difference, but once the next generation comes around in another 3-5 years I imagine they will want to be in a place where they can leverage all these franchises to get people excited to buy their new box over their competitors. And you do that with exclusives.

      • evilviper@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        minecraft also a large number of things going for it.

        1. It was(is) a single game
        2. It was already multiplatform, and only the most suicidal company would take a game that was multiplatform and make it exclusive. Not including the backlash as players lost access to a game they paid for, but there would also be untold number of refunds that would need to be done, lawsuits (most likely) to handle, etc.
        3. It already had a very large (and most importantly) young userbase that they could monetize on dozens of platforms.
        4. If you followed the proceedings of everything that is going on you’ll have read that they actually wanted to make the new minecraft legends xbox exclusive. While the emails didn’t say what ended up making them change their mind, I would imagine being in a certain legal fight might have played a large role in it.
        5. Exceptions happen, but I imagine that exception would be the appropriate word rather than norm. But I’d love to be proven wrong.