Xbox Boss Responds to PlayStation's Call of Duty Exclusivity Concerns

By Cade Onder

Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has responded to PlayStation's extremely vocal concerns about what could happen if Call of Duty became exclusive to the Microsoft-owned platform. In case you have somehow missed it, Microsoft announced it will be acquiring Activision for nearly $70 billion, meaning it would take on franchises like Call of Duty as first-party titles. It's the biggest deal in the history of gaming, which has resulted in tons of scrutiny from other platform holders, players, and regulators. As the deal makes its way through the regulators, a number of concerns have been raised, namely surrounding the future of Call of Duty.

Earlier this month PlayStation boss Jim Ryan raised concerns over what would happen after the Sony platform loses its deal with Call of Duty in three years, which Xbox will honor. Ryan called Microsoft's proposal "inadequate" and certainly approached the topic with some frustration. Now, Xbox boss Phil Spencer is responding via an interview with CNBC and reaffirmed that Microsoft plans to continue to release Call of Duty on PlayStation. Spencer also noted that while exclusive games are a piece of Xbox, the company wants to make sure that more players than ever can play via PC releases and even by letting players play games via web browser courtesy of the cloud.

"I can't talk a ton about where we are in regulatory just because of the mechanism that that is," said Spencer. "I've set out there publicly to our fans and our customers,, which is where our strongest commitment is, that our expectation is we'll continue to ship Call of Duty on PlayStation and other places where people see it, and hopefully expand the places people are playing all of our games. That's been our goal. We put the player at the center and through technologies like cloud, shipping day and date on PC, our expectation is the games we're building will be played by more players going forward. That's our goal with all the games we're playing today."

Of course, unless contractually obligated to do otherwise, Microsoft would be free to make Call of Duty a complete Xbox exclusive if it really wanted to. As it stands, Spencer says it plans to keep it on PlayStation for the foreseeable future and given Minecraft has remained that way too, that isn't hard to believe. Only time will tell if things change, but right now, we can only base what will happen on what Phil Spencer says since he's the only one who truly knows.

What do you think will happen to Call of Duty in the future? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.

[H/T Eurogamer]

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