Phil Spencer, the boss of Xbox, is visibly tired of answering questions about the future of the Call of Duty license on Playstation after the takeover of Activision-Blizzard. In a podcast, the framework was formal: Call of Duty will remain on Playstation, without conditions or deadlines.
As you probably know, the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard for an amount of more than 60 billion dollars is currently being examined by the competition authorities of many countries, and in particular those of the United Kingdom. For these institutions, the important thing lies above all in the fate of the American publisher’s flagship licenses, such as Call of Duty.
The idea is above all to ensure that this takeover will not put other manufacturers, Sony in mind, in a weak position for the release of their next consoles. In the eyes of the CMA (the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority), Call of Duty games are capable of “to make a material difference in the success of rival gaming platforms”.
Faced with these legitimate concerns, Phil Spencer, the boss of Xbox, has spoken out on several occasions. During an interview with the YouTube channel, the executive assured that he had no intention of removing Call of Duty from Playstation. In September 2022, Mr Spencer had made a written commitment to Jim Ryan, the boss of Sony Interactive Entertainment, that Call of Duty remains on Playstation. On his side, Jim Ryan had called this statement “insufficient in many respects“.
Phil Spencer doesn’t want to stick a knife in Sony’s back
And precisely, at the microphone of the podcast Decoder of The Verge, the leader of Xbox has maintained this position. For him, the idea is not to shoot Sony in the back in several years. “It’s not that at some point I pull the rug out from under the Playstation 7’s legs and say Ahah you didn’t write a contract long enough. There is no contract that mentions Forever. I think the idea of writing a contract containing Never is a little ridiculous, but I have no problem making a longer-term commitment that would be fine with Sony and the regulators.” he explains.
During this exchange, host Nilay Patel highlighted an important point. Indeed, it is not impossible that the availability of Call of Duty on Playstation is limited to certain formats only. For example, nothing would prevent Microsoft from offering COD games only through the Playstation cloud. This will not be the case according to him. “Native Call of Duty on Playstation, not linked to Game Pass, without streaming. If they want a streaming version of Call of Duty, we could do that too, like we do on our own consoles.”