Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been met with some resistance while various regulatory groups across the world have analyzed it for any anti-competitive elements, with Sony being one of the loudest voices in the room. The home of PlayStation has criticized as being potentially harmful to its business, but Microsoft’s head of gaming Phil Spencer has once again dismissed the idea that Call of Duty will become an Xbox console exclusive.
“We’re not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation,” Spencer said on the Same Brain videocast (that section is highlighted in a tweet from The Verge’s Tom Warren below). “Our intent is not to do that and long as there is a PlayStation out there to ship to, our intent is that we continue to ship Call of Duty on PlayStation. Similar to what we’ve done with Minecraft, we’ve expanded the places that people can play Minecraft [and] we haven’t reduced the places.”
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II just celebrated its biggest launch yet on PlayStation. Sony revealed that Modern Warfare II has become the “biggest PlayStation Store launch” of all time for the Call of Duty series, including both preorders and day-one sales. On Xbox and Steam, the game holds the top spot on the best-seller lists, keeping the tradition of Call of Duty being a blockbuster multiplatform release alive and well.
Sony has been very vocal about Microsoft’s potential ownership of the franchise though, as the PlayStation company still has several deals with Activision to offer its users exclusive content as an incentive to use its platform to play the games. Spencer has repeatedly promised that Call of Duty will be available on PlayStation for years beyond the current deal established by Activision as Microsoft focuses on its mobile push. Sony has disputed this, and has claimed that the new deal only guarantees three extra years for the series to be on PlayStation.
The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors.
GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
