Sony announced in January 2022 that Bungie had joined the PlayStation family, calling the Destiny dev a world-class group that could build incredible worlds to captivate millions of people, but now, it seems to be treating the studio like a bit of a red-headed stepchild. In a new document that includes some of the PlayStation maker’s latest comments concerning the CMA’s findings on Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Sony made the claim that it wouldn’t be able to cope with losing Call of Duty, as it only has one other main shooter franchise, Destiny, which it described as being “significantly less impactful,” with redacted figures that allude to substantially less gameplay hours and game spending. Elsewhere, Sony called its development experience of FPS games “limited” and claimed that it would be “impossible” for it to create something that could come close to Call of Duty.
From a “SIE Observations on the CMA’s Provisional Findings” document dated March 1, 2023:
SIE cannot protect against the loss of Call of Duty. Given the importance of Call of Duty, SIE cannot effectively protect against a Microsoft foreclosure strategy. In particular:
- SIE’s recent development experience of shooter/battle royale games is limited and its main active shooter franchise is significantly less impactful than Call of Duty. Destiny, SIE’s main active first-person shooter franchise, had only [redacted] of the gameplay hours and [redacted] of the game spend of Call of Duty in 2021.
- While there may be a wide range of studios that may help SIE produce hit titles, producing one as durable and successful as Call of Duty would be close to impossible. As the CMA notes, “there are few franchises as enduring and as significant in terms of PlayStation’s revenue and gameplay time” and that new titles have “a low chance of success” (PFs, para. 7.235).
- Even for its most important first-party titles, SIE’s development costs are small in comparison to Call of Duty. God of War: Ragnarök, SIE’s biggest ever first-party title, had a total development cost of $[redacted] million spread over [redacted] years (with an average annual investment of $[redacted] million). More generally, across its nine most recently released and upcoming first-party titles (which have either sold or are expected to sell more than [redacted] million copies in aggregate) the average annual development cost was around $[redacted] million. By contrast, Activision has reportedly spent around $300 million on each annual release of Call of Duty.
Discussion (8 replies)
Join Discussion →Lol if I was invested in sony gaming I would be selling right now. If they can't handle the impact of loosing one title it's not worth being a company.
Also, all this fuss over COD is almost like pissing on their own inhouse studios and exclusive games. Sure COD is big but to draw so much attention to it like this makes it seem like that's the only reason anyone would want a PS. Obviously that's not true but this could be looked at in that way.
It's a cheap chance for them to hurt MS a direct competitor of theirs on many fronts. Imagine the size of turd they would pass if MS decided to buy a movie studio, or get in bed with someone like Disney.
They are doing this because the LOE to make their competitor burn resources is low. For every dollar they spend MS is probably spending 1k if not more. Thing is MS has the cash to burn at scale that Sony can't touch.
3rd bigges game franchise it seems, should be worth it to try and keep it
You aren’t wrong. But how many different platforms does the #1 game run on?
Don’t need cross platform if you have a strong enough game, and Sony has plenty of good 1st party titles if they keep investing in them. People play more than shooters on consoles
I don't like to play shooters on console not handy enough with the controller, but that's me.
Still if they sell to 10% of the PS4/5 owners that's 15 million orso games, that's a nice chunk of change, they can also only crank out so many first party titles
CoD probably sells more on PlayStation than any other platform too - MS would be cutting off their own nose in spite of their face to restrict it to just the Xbox ecosystem. But I can see the thinking in hoping it would move more over to the platform
Although there are two flaws with that thinking:
The first - if Halo couldn’t get them and keep them on Xbox, what makes them think CoD will do any better?
Second, and the most important think MS is not thinking of: console/platform choice is not a zero sum game. People can, and do, buy into multiple platforms. CoD might sell a few more Xboxes, but people are still gonna buy Nintendo for Zelda, and Sony for Final Fantasy.
I would bet that making CoD exclusive would -not- sell enough Xboxes to make up for the loss of Sony revenue - and I’m sure MS realizes that and that makes it an easy throw away term to promise CoD on all these other platforms.
COD is also heavily multiplayer even though I only played for the single player campaigns so having more platforms makes for a healtier player base.