If we told you that shooters are an important genre in the industry, you would point out that that is self-evident for any gamer. But what if we told you that the genre is particularly important to Microsoft?
This is something that Microsoft freely admitted to the EU, as the EU revealed in their decision on the Microsoft Activision deal. On paragraph 355 on page 80 of the decision, the EU stated this:
“The Xbox user data corroborates the fact that shooter games are a particularly important genre.
Compared to all other genres of games distributed on Xbox, the shooter genre shows the highest daily and monthly playtime levels on Xbox and days played per month in 2021 worldwide and in the EEA.
Further, Microsoft’s own internal analysis of user engagement on Xbox shows that shooter games have the [business secrets concerning Microsoft’s Xbox user data] share of user engagement on Xbox worldwide, both by game time and consumer spend on game purchases and add-ons.”
So, the EU opted to keep the data proving this confidential, but it isn’t hard for the rest of us to figure out how this is the case.
For example, when you consider the major legacy franchises that Xbox itself has, most of them are obviously shooters. You can immediately run down the likes of Halo, Gears of War, Perfect Dark, the one time Xbox exclusive Bioshock, and so forth. Microsoft also has Banjo Kazooie, Killer Instinct, and had Dead or Alive, but it’s clear what kinds of games Xbox is known for.
Xbox in general had a key role in the history of online gaming. While Sony was not willing to commit to online play on the PlayStation 2, Microsoft did the actual work on building the infrastructure and convincing gamers to adopt it as a genre and as a new way of playing games.
And, of course, the big games that swayed gamers to playing online shooters on console was Halo and Halo 2. Halo 2 is the biggest first party best seller on the Xbox, with 6.3 million units sold. That also added up to 500 million games played, and 710 million hours logged in Xbox Live as of June 2006.
Here and now, however, third party shooters have definitely taken more prominence on Xbox than their own first party offerings. And among those games, Call of Duty is one of the biggest games in that genre, competing with games that intersect with other genres like Fortnite Battle Royale and Grand Theft Auto Online.
So it’s easy to understand why Microsoft wanted to acquire Activision Blizzard King, the publishers of both Call of Duty and Overwatch. Of course, the company can also always make entirely new shooters to be Xbox exclusive.
