Sony expects Microsoft to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation
Sony has issued a statement saying it expects Microsoft to honour existing "contractual agreements" with PlayStation
Sony expects Microsoft to keep Activision Blizzard's roster of games available on PlayStation platforms. In a new statement issued to the Wall Street Journal, a spokesperson for the company noted: "We expect that Microsoft will abide by contractual agreements and continue to ensure Activision games are multiplatform."
Since the bombshell news that Microsoft plans to acquire Activision Blizzard was announced, one of the burning questions that has been on players' minds has been about the status of Call of Duty: will Microsoft take it off PlayStation altogether? Will only Warzone, as an existing community, remain on PlayStation platforms? Will nothing actually change, overall, despite the planned acquisition?
Of course, Sony's statement goes beyond simply the Call of Duty franchise; series like Overwatch, Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Diablo, Tony Hawk's and more besides are all part of the deal. With Sony's first official statement on the matter pushing Microsoft to remember ActiBlizz's contractual obligations, we're to assume there's something in place that means we'll see the company's games remain on PlayStation – at least in the short term.
It wouldn't be the first time that Microsoft has honoured pre-existing contractual agreements, either; when the Xbox owner announced the acquisition of Bethesda parent company, Zenimax, in 2020, both Arkane's Deathloop and Tango Gameworks' Ghostwire: Tokyo were confrimed to still be PS5 exclusives. That didn't stop Microsoft from claiming Bethesda's sci-fi RPG, Starfield, as its own some time later, though.
There's still a lot that we don't know about how this acquisition is going to shake out; it still needs to get past market regulators, before anything else. This initial – potentially damage-controlling – statement from Sony addresses some fans' key concerns, but everyone out there still has a lot of questions about how all this is going to work.
We've published a list of dream games we'd love to see come from this acquisition, ranging from a new Warcraft RTS by World’s Edge to Tim Schafer’s Spyro the Dragon, which you can read right now!