If you only read gaming news casually, you might be under the impression that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft just bought the rights to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty, and now Sony is crying foul. That's only part of the story, however. Microsoft actually bought 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Activision Blizzard King, a conglomerate of three of the biggest games studios in the world (which makes, amongst other things, Call of Duty). Microsoft plans to absorb these three massive companies, which already combine to make a really massive company, into its own really really massive company, making it really really really massive. I think it's bad for gaming as a whole, but what's worse is that the on꧋ly sticking point for legislators seems to b෴e Call of Duty.
Activision Blizzard King owns a lot of games. Even if you slice off highly-profitable King and the mobile arm, as many often do, that still leaves 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:World of Warcraft, Sekiro, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Overwatch, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Bandicoot, Diablo, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spyro the Dragon, Hearthstone, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and a smattering of others. All of these games are beloved (maybe that's not quite the right world for Diablo or Overwatch, but at least a lot of people play them) and an important part of the gaming canon. And yet, all anyone can talk about is Call of Duty. That we care so much about one game that is an industry leader in nothing (apart from sales) is extremely worrying. CoD does not have the best graphics on the market, the best narrative, the best technological prowess, and while it has casual popularity, the gameplay itself is no longer the unachievable pinnacle of the shooter industry.
Here’s the basic situation. Because ABK is such a huge company, Microsoft’s acquisition 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:has to go through various watchdogs which ensure it will not lead to a monopoly. It’s an important step and there are various reasons why this might be blocked: one company owning too large a slice of any given industry can be bad for both consumers and workers (which we’ll explore more below), as well as ma😼king said industry anti-competitive. This not only risks putting peers out of business (in this case, Sony and Nintendo), but also means Microsoft would be able to control the industry unchecked, worsening pretty much everything for pretty much everybody - again, more on that later.
These checks are a good thing. Monopolisation is a bad thing. That’s a little ideological, but it’s my position on the matter and I think anyone who doesn’t directly stand to profit off this feels the same way too. The problem is those aren’t the issues being talked about. All of the discussion, amongst players, companies, and legislators, is about who gets to own Call of Duty. One single shooter game has become more important than any issues that directly impact players or workers, and it’s impossible to pick a side. I don’t really care who owns Call of Duty at the end of all this. I don’t care if Xbox keeps it and makes it exclusive, keeps it and shares it (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the current offer), buys Activision Blizzard King but has to make CoD independent (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:which it has ruled out), or the deal falls through. I just want the things that are meant to be checkꦿed, to 🉐be checked.
No Call of Duty game has ever been near TheGamer’s Game of the Year list, and I can’t recall a single major site giving any recent Call of Duty game that honour. At 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Game Awards, CoD only ever shows up in very specific online shooter categories. It’s not a great game that PlayStation absolutely needs to offer a substantial player experience. It only wants it to make money. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was the top-selling game of 2022, and Call of Dutys Vanguard and Black Ops Cold War were the top two highest selling games of 2021. This has never really been about players having access to the games they love or whatever corporate buzzwords have been thrown about. It's about money. Moolah. Reddies. Cold hard cash. Wonga.
It's business. I'm not naive. Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard because its reputation was damaged and it was available at a cut price, and Xbox needs a leg up in the console war. It wasn't for the players, it was for cash. Xbox arguing that Call of Duty is ‘just another game’ is dishonest and demeans its position, and if it were made exclusive (which is not the ꦇcurrent proposal), it would be a major power swing.
But PlayStation pointing this out as a gotcha also seems a bit rich - Sony is the one who has made exclusivity a major selling point in the console war, Sony has already spent time buying up studios (including Insomniac from under Xbox's noses), and has continued on that path with the acquisition of Bungie and Bluepoint. Sony even has a long-running exclusivity deal with Call of Duty that allows its players access to more guns or maps, as well as entire modes, a pattern it has repeated with many other games.
Microsoft has offered decent solutions too. It put forward a ten-year deal that would ensure Call of Duty would remain on PlayStation at the same price, on the same date, with the same features (a fairer deal than Xbox currently gets now) for the next decade, which has 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:already been signed by Nintendo. Microsoft has argued that it can't feasibly offer a contract that goes on forever, and that ten years is a show of good faith. A lot can change in a decade too - if Call of Duty's stock falls, would Microsoft be beholden to continuous releases to honour a longer contract with Sony rather than wrapping the series up and moving on to something else? It seems unlikely right now, but if Sony wants a forever contract, eventually Call of Duty will die off and that introduces contractual complications. A decade of shared rights, with a view to revisit and extend, feels fair.
This is not about taking Xbox's side here. I wrote at the time of the Activision Blizzard acquisition announcement that it 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:would be bad for everybody, and I still believe that. But not because of Call of Duty. The reason this acquisition is such bad news is that it vastly increases the risk of Xbox's smaller studios being crushed up into mulch to serve as fertilizer in the soil of its biggest behemoths - this has happened before with Activision, with the impressive work of both Toys for Bob and Vicarious Visions not being enough to save them from the remorseless grasp of Call of Duty.
Conglomerates owning multiple studios should incentivise them into taking bolder risks - they know if a small game from a minor studio flops, the biggest games are going to keep hauling in the cash to cover any losses. But instead, it inspires greed. Why make a small game at all? Why not have that minor studio work on the big game, ensuring it can be produced even faster? Then there’s the fact a developer can’t really ever leave - if Xbox management pushes for poorer worker conditions, and owns all the studios, where do these devs go? They have no bargaining power when they can’t leave. The arguments that it creates a monopoly and damages the competition are true, but it damages those inside the monopoly and that's also worth mentioning.
Ultimately, I don't want Microsoft to buy Activision Blizzard King. I didn't want Sony to buy Bungie either. There are a lot of very big companies buying up quite big companies and soon there won't be any room left for even the smallest of companies to survive. But I don't want the deal to fall through because of Call of Duty either. I don't want one good-to-average military shooter with generic ideas that has been running on fumes to be so powerful that that fabric of our industry rips itself in two for it. Maybe worse than Xbox owning Call of Duty is the games industry admitting that Call of Duty owns us. That no piece of art the medium might create is even worth a damn in the shadow of a first-person shooter past its peak.
If Sony gets its way over this, it will be a hollow victory struck not for the little guy, but to embolden Sony's own greed. It doesn’t matter where this all ends, what matters is nobody has ever asked the right questions, and that’s a dangerous precedent going forward. Will all future buyouts hinge on a ‘pass/fail’ metric of whether the acquired studio has a game bigger than CoD? Whoever wins, we lose.