Since Microsoft decided to buy Activision-Blizzard we have experienced one of the longest and most famous legal soap operas in history, where the two contenders who have sticking for the hegemony of the desktop console market for more than 20 years, they have thrown the stuff to the head with a name that has captured all the headlines: call of duty.
It seemed that it did not matter all the IPs that Activision has behind it, the successes of brands like King or that Blizzard is the king of certain types of games on PC -and now consoles with Diablo IV-, that Sony put every imaginable argument to block the purchase in a scenario where call of duty It remains an Xbox exclusive and, we imagine, PC too.
Are exclusives not business?
So, you have to remember that call of duty It was already exclusive to one platform, of a digital store specifically, and things did not go as expected by those responsible. Activision and Blizzard were two independent companies until they merged in 2007. The ones from Irvine, the parents of world of warcraft, At that time they had their own ecosystem on PC called Battle.net which, although originally focused on managing the multiplayer of their titles, ended up also becoming an online store where it was possible to reserve and buy any release from the company.
So there came a time when Activision thought that Why give the sales commissions of your games in digital format to a third party?Valve with Steam, if they could keep it all by letting call of duty It was sold exclusively on Battle.net. So said and done and in 2018 Black Ops 4 it was only possible to have it and play it through the store of the Devil, starcraftetc.
The result, as we tell you, was not very positive and Over the years it became clear that leaving Steam was a very bad strategy.. So much so that in those trial sessions Microsoft used that experience from the years in which call of duty was exclusive to Battle.net on PC to prove his theory that the saga could never again be parked on one shore. That he would touch as many as he could.
The figures of the disaster
As we tell you, the presence of call of duty exclusively on Battle.net was, according to Microsoft, a “resounding failure” and although the goal was to “attract users and grow” the franchise within the PC ecosystem, in the end it was not possible. Furthermore, it was necessary Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 will arrive again on Steam at the end of 2022 so that that player base grow exponentiallygoing from 67 million on average when we could only purchase their games in the Blizzard store, to the current 131 million in Valve’s.
So it seems that, indeed, when you limit the availability of a product both for the sake of exclusivity and attending only to business issues regardless of what users think… these things happen. Don’t you think?
