Microsoft made an intriguing argument to convince the EU to approve their deal to acquire Activision Blizzard King.
This argument is found in the EU decision that did approve the deal, with several remedies attached to it. On paragraph 324, page 72 of the decision, they say this:
“… new entrants, such as Valve’s Steam Deck, would have been able to successfully enter the console market without distributing Call of Duty.”
This is in the part of the document where Microsoft explains that Call of Duty doesn’t have to be on every console, because it isn’t that important to the video game industry. We already examined most of the other arguments they made to prove this point here, but we wanted to take the time out to focus on this one.
As you may remember Valve’s reentry into the hardware market launched in February 25, 2022. Valve provided their Steam Deck with their own bespoke operating system, SteamOS. While all Steam games are playable on Windows, Valve wanted to make hardware that was explicitly designed to reduce their dependency on Windows.
With that in mind, Valve made the necessary investments to make games programmed for Windows playable on SteamOS, which is itself based on the Linux kernel. Now, Valve learned when they first launched Steam Machines in 2015 that it was prohibitively difficult to convince developers to bring their games to Linux natively. While it wasn’t impossible, the effort needed to make these ports, and the difficulty of getting those games to perform at the same level, didn’t make it worthwhile for the game developers and publishers.
So, what Valve invested in was WiNE, a protocol that allowed Linux to run Windows APIs. They forked WiNE to make their own bespoke version called Proton, which is key to the compatibility of games on SteamOS, and ultimately, the Steam Deck.
This is all relevant to Call of Duty, because even now that Activision has started publishing Call of Duty games on Steam, they aren’t playable on the Steam Deck. When you remember that Call of Duty is an annual franchise, the amount of effort needed to make native Linux games was not worth it.
However, even with Proton, making Call of Duty games playable on the Steam Deck still isn’t worth it. Activision runs their own account system, that needs extra work to work on Linux. On top of that, Call of Duty has its own anti-cheat system, Ricochet, which is also prohibitively difficult to use on Linux. Ricochet itself has become such an ornate system that Activision has now been using it to silo away cheaters and watch them play. Other games that have anti cheat systems, by virtue of being online multiplayer games, also frequently turn out to be incompatible with Steam Deck.
Thankfully, Valve can easily tout that Steam Deck really did not need Call of Duty to be successful. As per Omnia, the device is expected to sell 3 million units this year. Unlike the Nintendo Switch, Valve doesn’t have so many first party games to rely on, especially new ones. But Steam is such a huge marketplace that it didn’t need to cater to Call of Duty fans, or online shooter fans, really.
