Microsoft has shared an interesting detail in the paperwork for the very quickly processed FTC federal case vs the MS – Activision deal.
Of course, much like with the CMA and the EU, Microsoft shared arguments and evidence to make their case that the deal would not harm competition.
One of those points was that Microsoft wouldn’t take Call of Duty off of PlayStation, because it makes way too much money on the platform. Even when you consider that there are gamers who have a PlayStation and an Xbox, or a PC, or all three, most of the player base for Call of Duty plays on PlayStation.
That would be, basically, deciding to make considerably less money, to an amount that would have shareholders asking questions. It really is now at a much larger scale compared to when the two console makers were fighting over the franchise, in the early years of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
As reported by GameRant, Microsoft brought up a decision Activision made a few years ago that actually cost them. That was the choice to leave Steam, and distributing Call of Duty games on PC using their own client, Battle.net.
Activision started this experiment in 2018, with Call of Duty 4, and ended it last year with the new release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Activision then saw it fit to relist their older Call of Duty games onto Valve’s platform.
Activision was not the only major game company to make this choice. In various degrees, Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, and Rockstar Games all set up their own clients to distribute games, with some of them building the infrastructure to sell games themselves.
Of course, the most successful of them at building a competitor to Steam is Fortnite and Unreal Engine developer Epic Games. But perhaps the big difference here is that Epic has a real stake in making games using their Unreal engine successful, on top of wanting to make a Steam competitor.
Ubisoft, EA, and others did not necessarily want to make their own Steam. But what they did want to do is not split their revenue with Valve. And so, fans of Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, and others had to choose to use their respective launchers as well.
But of course, what Microsoft revealed was something gamers already suspected anyway. Most gamers didn’t want to leave Steam, and chose not to follow their favorite games onto other PC platforms.
And with that in mind, we now understand why Valve was confident that Microsoft would do right by them if and when they acquired Activision. Valve doesn’t need a contract as much as Microsoft needs to make that revenue.
