Call of Duty almost abandoned Xbox this generation

During the hearing between the FTC and Microsoft last week, we learned new details about the events that preceded Microsoft's decision to acquire both Activision and Bethesda. Sony was in talks with Bethesda to make Starfield a PS5 exclusive, which prompted Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda. A very similar situation almost occurred with Activision pulling Call of Duty. 

When it came time to launch the new generation of consoles, Activision entered talks with Microsoft, threatening to pull Call of Duty from the Xbox platform unless it got more favourable terms.

Speaking on the witness stand, Microsoft's Sarah Bond confirmed Activision told them that Call of Duty may not launch on Xbox Series X/S at all if Microsoft didn't “move beyond the standard revenue share”. This led to a ‘sweetheart' deal, where Activision gets a higher percentage of the revenue split from the Xbox store.

This confirms two things – alternate revenue share deals do exist for the top publishers on console stores, and that Microsoft's console business is so far behind PlayStation at this point that some of the larger publishers are quite comfortable skipping Xbox, but would not be comfortable skipping PlayStation.

“It was clear that Call of Duty would be on PS5 and that would not have been good if it was not also on Xbox if it was launching at the same time”, Bond said. “Time was limited. We had players whose expectations we wanted to meet, so we ultimately made a decision that it was the best thing for the business.”

Bond's time on the stand also revealed a few ways that Sony's marketing deals have stopped Xbox from advertising certain games on their platform. Due to Activision's marketing deal with Sony for Call of Duty, when Vanguard launched, Xbox was not allowed to advertise the game as coming to Xbox on its biggest channels, like YouTube. The end goal here was to ensure that only people within the Xbox ecosystem would know that Call of Duty was coming to the console, limiting Microsoft's reach to potential new customers on other platforms, or those who are still undecided on a console.

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KitGuru Says: Chances are, even if Vanguard had not been ‘optimised for Xbox Series X/S', the Xbox One version would have been available and playable through backwards compatibility. Still, there is no denying that it would have been a bad look for Microsoft to launch its latest console next to the PS5 without that year's Call of Duty launching on it. 

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