Making Call Of Duty An Xbox Exclusive Could Prevent Microsoft’s Acquisition Of Activision Blizzard From Passing Regulators

The biggest news of the year already hit before the first month was over. Microsoft’s announced acquisition of Activision Blizzard King for an astronomical price of $68.7 billion will continue to send ripples through the industry.However, the deal is not yet finalized. The current projection is that it’ll be sealed by June 2023, but before that it needs to go through plenty of checks and red tape.Interestingly, some analysts have pointed to a potential reason as to why the deal perhaps wouldn’t go through, that being the potential Xbox exclusivity of the Call Of Duty franchise.One of the first questions many PS5 and PS4 players had when they woke up yesterday morning to find Microsoft flashing their checkbook was “Will Call Of Duty become an Xbox exclusive?”.For some, it may seem obvious. You don’t spend that kind of money to not make Call Of Duty exclusive to your platform. The analysts GamesIndustry.Biz spoke to however, don’t think it’s even on the table – because it could stop the whole deal.“It should also be noted that on the console side Call of Duty is really the only big franchise from Activision” says David Cole, an analyst from DFC Intelligence.“The big issue is if COD becomes a Microsoft exclusive. Right now, I don’t think [it will]. For one thing, it would be hard to get it past regulators if they want to lock the competition out.”It’s a fair point to make, and one that should put the minds of Warzone players on PlayStation more at ease.There’s already a lot of anti-trust issues that need to be investigated in a deal like this, and choosing to lock out competition of the largest console game franchise in the world could become a roadblock in this deal happening at all.At the end of the day, we still need to hear from Microsoft what they’ll be doing with IP like Call Of Duty and others anyways. Besides, they’ve already said they’ll publish some Activision Blizzard games on PlayStation. Source – [GamesIndustry.Biz]



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