Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard may go ahead in the United States, as Judge Corley sees no danger of harming competition.
Taking over Activision and making CoD an exclusive down the line (I know the deal specifies not for a while, but it’s clear as soon as that period is up they’ll be making it an exclusive) is a negative move to combat that - it tries to combat dominance by introducing dominance
Microsoft should invest in their own exclusives to improve their own offering without affecting Sony, which would leave both in good positions, rather than taking offerings away from Sony which leaves both in mediocre positions.
It’s a 10 year deal. Sony can use that decade to invest in its own shooters like they used to with Killzone.
Sony refused to allow cross play for years, effectively making you buy a PS to play with your friends. They took cross platform MMOs like Destiny and made entire parts of it exclusive, stealing what should have been available to everyone who already paid.
Meanwhile Microsoft makes their stuff available on Steam, has nearly-full backcompat going back two decades, and gives me a path to play my games on phone.
Making COD exclusive isn’t happening. It would be a terrible business decision, just like making minecraft exclusive would be. COD is the highest selling game every single year. It’s a game that is filled with micro transactions, so the more people playing it the better.
But people will buy an XBox rather than a PS6/7 if they can’t play CoD on the latter… It’s not like people are already tied into a console 1-2 generations in the future, so this would influence what console people buy next.
With Minecraft most players play on PC and frankly taking it off Mac and Linux would make a lot of business sense for Microsoft, however as it’s Java and how easily modifiable and portable Java programs are, they know people would just get it working anyway. The same does not apply for CoD, where nearly everyone plays on console, and a significant part of what console someone buys is what games they can play on it.
