EA wants Call Of Duty to be an Xbox exclusive so it helps Battlefield

metro.co.uk:

Sony is dead set against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard but most publishers don’t care and one is actively in favour of it…

No matter what they may be saying at the moment, about keeping Call Of Duty multiformat, there’s no doubting that Microsoft’s planned purchase of Activision Blizzard is bad news for Sony, not least for how much the franchise will boost the appeal of Game Pass.

Microsoft has implied Call Of Duty won’t become an Xbox exclusive until around 2028 but when asked by regulators whether they view the deal as unfair most third party publishers have said they don’t have a problem with it.

Now EA has gone a step further and said they’re actively in favour of not only Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard but of Call Of Duty becoming an Xbox exclusive.

EA’s logic is that if Call Of Duty does become an Xbox exclusive then it will have less reach than it used to, and so it will be easier for Battlefield to do well as a multiformat rival.

‘In a world where there may be questions over the future of Call of Duty and what platforms that might be on or might not be on, being platform agnostic and completely cross-platform with Battlefield, I think is a tremendous opportunity,’ said EA CEO Andrew Wilson in an investors call.

Other publishers may be following the same logic when it comes to their own titles, which is why none of them so far have objected to Microsoft’s planned acquisition.

Wilson also discussed the failure of Battlefield 2042 and the future of the franchise in general, admitting that: ‘I don’t think we delivered in the last two iterations [of Battlefield]… in the way that we should have. There’s a lot of work that we’ve got to do there. But at its very core, this is an extraordinary IP. And what