Call of Duty will no longer cater to exclusivity, and have ‘100 percent parity’ on all platforms, based on a recent comment by Microsoft’s Phil Spencer. Features like early access, DLC updates or betas will be available to all players across several platforms at the same time.
This is an interesting and promising take on the future of Call of Duty, given Microsoft’s recent $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Call of Duty’s latest game, Modern Warfare 3, saw a beta launch exclusively on PlayStation consoles. However, this may no longer be the case going forward.
(Confirmed) Going forward Call of Duty will have 100% parity on for all platforms
— Idle Sloth💙💛 (@IdleSloth84_) October 17, 2023
This means launch timings, skins, and content will be the same.
There may be framerate and resolution differences based on Perf
No more platform-exclusive betas pic.twitter.com/5eAoYbivTk
Even Though Call of Duty Is Now Part of the Xbox Family, It Won’t Become an ‘Exclusive’
With the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, it seems like Call of Duty’s days of exclusivity are finally coming to an end. According to Phil Spencer,
For Call of Duty players on PlayStation, and in the future Nintendo, I want you to feel 100 percent part of the community. I don’t want you to feel like there’s content you’re missing out on, there’s skins you’re missing out on, there’s timing that you’re missing out on. That’s not the goal. The goal is 100 percent parity across all platforms…
As inspiring as this may seem, a completely technical parity may still not be possible. For instance, some platforms won’t be able to reach the same resolution or frame rates as Xbox Series X. Regardless, everything that’s part of the Call of Duty content will have parity across all platforms.
Despite the game being completely exclusive to Xbox devices, the recent acquisition resulted in plans that have the potential of bringing Call of Duty and other Activision Blizzard games to Xbox Game Pass. This will bring popular franchises like World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch to subscribers of Game Pass without any additional costs.
Even With the Recent Acquisition, Call of Duty Isn’t Coming to Game Pass This Year
Phil Spencer, in the same podcast, also confirmed that Game Pass will not add any Activision Blizzard games until 2024, due to regulatory issues. He stated how understandable the disappointment regarding all this is, referring to the acquisition as a long-term plan.
The regulatory issues Spencer pointed out were indeed problematic, considering how the acquisition went through a process that went on for almost two years. Initially, the FTC pointed out that the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard could be a threat to the video game industry in the long term. In light of these concerns, the merger was reworked and finally approached by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
Spencer remarked about CMA’s involvement in the entire process:
The regulatory process took so long and frankly, there was a lot of uncertainty in that process up until, really, a week before we closed, or really the week of, when the CMA finally came down to their decision, that we weren’t able to get in and work with mostly Activision Blizzard in this case on that back catalog work. I would love it if there was some kind of secret celebration drop that’s coming in the next couple of weeks—there’s not.
In contrast to this, back when Microsft had a deal with ZeniMax and Bethesda, massive titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3 made their way to Game Pass right after. This was a $7.5 billion deal that marks as a big driving point for Game Pass’ current success.
Xbox’s next big dive into the future of gaming will be the seamless collaboration between Xbox Cloud Gaming and Game Pass, which will bring these games to a larger player base. Something similar is being done by Netflix, where they provide games to subscribers without any extra charge.
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