Microsoft claims it ‘simply wouldn’t be profitable’ to make Call of Duty Xbox exclusive

videogameschronicle.com:

Microsoft has reiterated its claim that it doesn’t have plans to make Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive should it successfully acquire Activision Blizzard.

In a document sent to Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) discussing the proposed acquisition, Microsoft claims that any concerns that Call of Duty would no longer appear on PlayStation are unfounded because it “would simply not be profitable” for Microsoft.

“Regardless of how unsurprising Sony‘s criticism of content exclusivity is – given that PlayStation’s entire strategy has been centred on exclusivity over the years – the reality is that the strategy of retaining Activision Blizzard’s games by not distributing them in rival console shops would simply not be profitable for Microsoft,” the company claims in the docs.

“Such a strategy would be profitable only if Activision Blizzard’s games were able to attract a sufficiently large number of gamers to the Xbox console ecosystem, and if Microsoft could earn enough revenue from game sales to offset the losses from not distributing such games on rival consoles,” it adds.

“As if that weren’t enough, exclusivity strategies still result in title-specific costs,” it claims, giving further information that has been redacted from the document, likely due to confidentiality.

“Such costs, added to the lost sales estimated […] above, mean that Microsoft would not be able to offset the losses by earning higher revenues in the Xbox ecosystem as a result of implementing exclusivity.

“This is especially true considering (i) the ‘gamer-centric’ – as opposed to ‘device-centric’ – strategy that Microsoft has pioneered with Game Pass, and (ii) the fact that PlayStation has the most loyal users across its various