Making Call of Duty a Battle.net exclusive was apparently a 'resounding failure'
Activision Blizzard stopped releasing new Call of Duty games on Steam in 2018, opting to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 exclusive to Blizzard's Battle.net platform on PC. That store exclusivity strategy ended just last year with Modern Warfare 2, and according to Microsoft's lawyers, the whole thing was a «resounding failure.» That might be a slight exaggeration, though.
In a court document filed today (related to the recent hearing over Microsoft's pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard), Microsoft's legal team affirms the notion that Call of Duty's Battle.net exclusivity ended because it wasn't performing like Activision Blizzard had hoped—but what success would've meant is stated in terms of Battle.net's success, not CoD's, which leads me to quibble with it a bit.
«Activision's attempt to take PC digital sales of Call of Duty exclusive to its Battle.net platform was a resounding failure,» reads part of the document. «Before 2018, Activision sold digital versions of PC Call of Duty titles on Valve's successful Steam platform. In 2018, Activision decided to take the game off of Steam and make it exclusively available on Battle.net—largely in an effort to attract users to, and grow, Activision's own platform. Battle.net's monthly active users ('MAUs') remained relatively flat during the period when it had exclusive access to digital sales of Call of Duty on PC, from 2018 through 2022.»
It surprised me that Battle.net's monthly active users didn't grow while CoD was exclusive. Most online services saw a bump in 2020 as the pandemic kept people home, and the first CoD: Warzone, which released in March 2020, was a huge success. At the end of 2020, Activision Blizzard reported «a record year for the Call of Duty
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