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Otter on 21 January 2022
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Kristof81 said:

Personally, since I don't play COD games nowadays, pretty much any Sony's 1st party game would do.

However, in reality, this ain't gonna happen. Warzone will stay multi-plat as is, just like Minecraft did, but regular, future COD games? They didn't make the biggest acquisition in history to hand it to their biggest competitor. In fact, I can see them making some huge incentives in WZ via Gamepass for the PS players to either switch platforms (and I don't mean XBOX only, it could be any MS platform) or pay a monthly subscription.

I wish I was wrong as I'm all for muli-plat releases and cross-play, but just looking at the future Bethesda's roadmap, in few years Sony will be out of the picture. MS simply bets everything on Gamepass and they'll make damn sure that fans of the IPs they own will have no choice but join the GP. It's a simple economy of scale. 

I'm curious, why do you think Minecraft Dungeons was released on Playstation? I feel like people often just skip over that or treat it as a one off anomaly. 

Regarding the bold Microsoft themselves have to make sense of the fact that Call of Duty without the Playstation fanbase may very see huge declines and risk being replaced by a competitor. A damaged brand bring gamepass less value than a highly valuable one. COD could be a poster boy of Gamepass every year if they're able to maintain its standing and that longterm can be way healthier than throwing its future popularity into question through an aggressive cutting of its audience. Many of whom simply will not purchase a new console or turn into PC gamers over night.

So for MS you don't spend 70bn on assets  to drive the value of those assets down the drain through alienating the audience, reducing the financial return of each entry and giving boom to their competitors. Rise of the Tomb Raider was likely a major lesson for both Microsoft and Crystal Dynamics, when exclusives don't make sense it damages the title in question and doesn't bring the rewards you would hope. We will be 4 CODs down the road (on PS5) before MS likely has freedom to make it exclusive and it'd risk causing irreversable damage to the brand to spend 4 years of a generation with exclusive marketing building an audience heavily leaning towards one platform and then suddenly flipping that on its head/ saying F you to all of those users you attracted to Playstation through the first half of a generation.  

MS will make a ton of money from selling COD on Playsation and they can perform their objective of pulling people to Gamepass with all manor of incentives relating to the franchise (Day one Gamepass, early/exclusive DLC etc/Exclusive marketing). Full exclusivity is always a possibility, but people shouldn't assume it be the default. Disney has Disney+ but it stills sells its movies on Apple TV and Video Prime. Exclusivity would have been the default before MS decided on this new direction (gaming on every device/all connected via your Gamepass sub) but prior to this new direction, a purchase like Activision wouldn't of made any sense and the 70b is truly about more than COD or competing against playstation (metaverse/mobile gaming etc)