The company refused to work with Xbox Series X|S development kits if they didn’t increase its profits.
During the first day of the trial that is taking place these days for the blockade of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States to Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzardwe have already been able to learn some new details about upcoming releases from the company such as The Outer Worlds 2, but also some dirty laundry is coming to lighteven of Activision and its historical relationship with PlayStation. Reason why Activision almost ended up pulling Call of Duty from Xbox at the beginning of this new generation of consoles.
Before the arrival of the new generation in stores, Activision refused to work on Xbox if he did not increase his profit percentage on the Microsoft platform, so they were forced to change their agreements.
Call of Duty had another deal with PlayStation
During his speech at the trial, Sarah Bond, Vice President of Xboxassured that Microsoft and Activision negotiated a new distribution of benefits to be able to have Call of Duty on Xbox Series X | S consoles, since Bobby Kotic’s company had implied that had another deal with PlayStation and refused to work with dev kits of the new console from Redmond. “It was clear that Call of Duty would be on PS5 and if they were released at the same time (Xbox Series X | S), it would not have been good if it had not also been on Xbox, ”says Bond (via The Verge).
Later, Bond claims that Microsoft has confirmed Lower the typical profit split from 70/30 to 80/20 in cases “where we believe it is critical to obtain that content.” In other words, in principle it will not apply to all publishers equally.
still remain a few days of litigation ahead in which it is expected that we learn new details of the operation of the part we don’t see of the video game industry. For now, the main argument of the FTC to block the agreement with Activision is the example of what Microsoft has done with Bethesda after its purchase.