With the talk about how CoD is going to be using longer dev cycles, i think MS could allow this years one to release and have the next one ready just after the contract is finished. So instead of having to release 3 CoD's on PS5, They could just release this years one and hold the next one back for 2 or 3 years and make that exclusive to Xbox and PC. Hell by that time they might even decide to make a Warzone 2 aswell.

I have very similar suspensions of this happening as well.  The timing of the "ditching yearly releases" announcement seems just a bit too convenient to me to ignore.

He mentioned nothing of future Call of Duty releases, he just said keep CoD on Playstation.  This could be as little as keeping servers for old games up alongside continued support for Warzone, all the way to all CoD games coming just as they always had.  It was extremely vague and every bit as useless as his Bethesda comments.

Given MS track record and how they have handled every other acquisition however, it is safe to say the former of the two above is most likely to happen.  Continued Warzone support, all new mainline games exclusive to XBox and PC (outside of any existing contracts that may or may not actually exist).

However in this case, if contracts do already exist, unless MS buys their way out of them...it will be a few years even after the acquisition before we really know what MS plans to do with CoD exclusivity.

But why mention Call of Duty at all? Take it out the tweet and the message remains the same.

Although I do agree COD will eventually be exclusive to the Xbox platform, but with Sony renewing their contract with Activision last year, and with how long they usually last (5 years), this may be more of a PS6 problem than a PS5 one.

Because lets be real, CoD is really the only game people are asking about when it comes to exclusive releases.

The same could be said about Crash, The Elder Scrolls, and Starfield.

There were a number of games being asked about with Bethesda, so it makes sense that they would be talked about generally.  DOOM, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Starfield...it wasn't just one IP.

After seeing what happened with Bethesda, I think most people can see what is happening with Crash and Spyro.  The reason everyone is asking about CoD, and the reason it was mentioned, is because of just how big of an IP it is.  I mean, even in decline it was still the most sold IP last year across all consoles, so it makes sense.

The above still applies to many Activision Blizzard titles. 

A lot of people were wondering about the future of TES, more so than the majority of other titles from Zenimax, because its a massive IP on multiple generations of Playstation hardware, yet through interviews, tweets, articles, etc, everyone spoke about it with some ambiguity, unlike the direct reference to Call of Duty in Phil Spencer's tweet. 

In terms of modern relevance, CoD is bigger than every other Bethesda IP, while every game I mentioned is probably bigger than every other Activision IP currently on console save for maybe Diablo.  Crash has only seen one new release that did less than its remastered collection, and Spyro only saw a collection afterall.  So it makes perfect sense that CoD would be singled out.

I still don't see the need to single out COD if we're basing it on modern relevance. Microsoft would've done the same with TES considering it is the prize catch of  Zenimax's catalog. The fact is, Phil didn't need to tweet about it, yet alone mention Call of Duty.