Microsoft promises lifetime support for Call of Duty on PlayStation
As you know, recently there has been quite a dispute between Sony and Microsoft over purchase of Activision Blizzard by the latter – Sony fears it will mean the end of the multi-platform existence of the Call of Duty franchise, which brings it serious profits on PlayStation.
Thus, in September, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan called Microsoft’s proposal to leave Call of Duty on Sony consoles for the next three years “absolutely inadequate” and one that does not take into account the interests of players.
And now Xbox head Phil Spencer announced that his company has intention to release Call of Duty series games on PlayStation “as long as there is a PlayStation to release them on.” He compared Microsoft’s plans for Call of Duty to what the company once did with Minecraft — after acquiring its developer Mojang in 2014 for $2.5 billion, the franchise remained cross-platform, and what’s more — the availability of Minecraft on different platforms only expanded.
At the same time, as Phil Spencer noted, he likes the idea of CoD appearing on the Nintendo Switch, but the mobile version of the game seems much more attractive to him: “there are three billion players in the world, and only 200 million of them play on consoles – the rest use smartphones for this.” Compared to the potential in the mobile market, he added, the idea of removing Call of Duty from the PlayStation platform to generate additional revenue on the Xbox seems trivial.