Following the defeat of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) attempts to block its purchase of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has now reached a deal with Sony regarding the future of the Call of Duty franchise on PlayStation.
"We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard," Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer stated in a tweet last week. "We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games."
Neither Spencer nor Microsoft clarified the terms of the agreement, nor if they're similar to the deals the company has signed with Nintendo and other cloud gaming providers.
Prior to the deal, Sony had contested Microsoft's planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard through regulatory proceedings in the U.S., the UK and Europe. However, the legal defeat of the FTC's attempt to block the deal seems to have forced Sony to settle.
In the past, Sony has made deals with Activision for special benefits for Call of Duty on PlayStation. These have included timed exclusive content and special marketing rights. Activision, in turn, has used this partnership with Sony to get negotiate better commission rates from Microsoft for the franchise on Xbox. (Read: Microsoft admits that Xbox Game Pass hurts game sales)
As for Microsoft, it claims that it is not in its financial interest to make the series exclusive as it generates billions of dollars in revenue by releasing it on multiple platforms. That said, the company's past actions show that it's more than willing to pull the PlayStation releases of games of companies it acquires, the most recent being Starfield.
With the new deal with Sony, it seems that Call of Duty will not suffer the same fate, at least for now.
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