Microsoft, Sony, and Call of Duty (Premium)

Sony and Microsoft are engaged in a war of words in legal filings aimed largely at determining the future of the Call of Duty franchise. There’s a lot at stake here, given the billions of dollars that Call of Duty generates every year. But this problem is easily solved.

Microsoft’s blockbuster Activision Blizzard $67.8 acquisition attempt is an interesting wrinkle in the ongoing debates about console exclusives and the recent shift to subscription-based cloud gaming, of course. But the basics are the same, and, more specifically, Sony and Microsoft have been at war over Call of Duty for 15 years. It started when Microsoft obtained an exclusivity arrangement with Activision in 2007, ensuring that map packs---what we now called Downloadable Content (DLC)---appeared first on Xbox 360, ensuring that that console was the go-to for first-person shooter fans. And then it escalated in 2015, when Sony snatched away those rights for PlayStation, suddenly making Xbox gamers second-class Call of Duty citizens going forward.

As a Call of Duty fan, I felt the pain in 2015, but it reached new heights of absurdity three years later when Xbox gamers didn’t get the final DLC drop for Call of Duty: WWII, which had been released the year before, until after the next COD title, Black Ops 4, launched. But then Activision suddenly and without explanation changed its DLC release policies; now, DLC would appear on Xbox (and PC) just 7 days after it did on PlayStation, as opposed to the original month.

These days, I’m not even sure there is an exclusivity window anymore. Largely because I’ve checked out more than a bit on COD in recent years since the two biggest titles in this time frame, the Modern Warfare remake (2019) and Black Ops: Cold War (2020), changed multiplayer dynamics for the worse so much that the multiplayer components of the games became unplayable for me. And because COD: Vanguard (2021), the most recent title, is just not that good. So I’ve pretty much skipped the three newest games and have been playing older titles instead, mostly 2018’s Black Ops 4. (Which, yes, is sad. I hope that changes with Modern Warfare 2, but I’m being realistic here too.)

Anyway. This isn’t so much about me as it is about Microsoft trying very much to convince antitrust regulators from around the world that its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which owns COD, isn’t just OK but will somehow benefit the industry. And about Sony trying to prevent this from happening.

I would normally make some sort of Godzilla and King Kong comparison here, noting the thrillingly voyeuristic spectacle of two videogame giants going at it. But a better comparison, if you follow sports, is the ongoing Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees rivalry, which was one-sided until Boston started spending as much on its teams as did New York. As a result, things have gone quite a bit differently in recent years.

Call of Duty exclusivity, likewise, was always abo...