With this year’s Call Of Duty underperforming to a worrying degree, a reader worries what that means for Activision and the future of Xbox.
Normally I’d claim that I’m pretty neutral in terms of Xbox versus PlayStation, but I have to say there is a part of me that is very glad to find out that you can’t buy success. Microsoft has been in the games business for almost 25 years now and it seems fair to say that it has not gone all that well for them.
Whether they abandon hardware or not really doesn’t matter at this stage, because nobody is buying the Xbox Series X anyone. Their games have gone multiformat, and they’ve had a good line-up this year, and yet I read that they haven’t had a game nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards for 15 years.
Despite owning half the games industry, they can’t seem to put out award-winning games or get anybody to buy their consoles. And now they seem to have broken Call Of Duty, only two years after buying Activision. At first that seems funny, but I worry what’s going to happen to them now.
Activision Blizzard cost Microsoft $75.4 billion. Microsoft said a lot of things when they bought them, that have not yet come true yet, saying they really bought them for mobile publisher King and that they were going to bring more games to Switch. They also said they wouldn’t raise prices. None of those things happened though.
No Activision Blizzard games have been released on Switch, King doesn’t seem to be doing anything different to what they did before being bought, and prices have skyrocketed almost as soon as the purchase was done – with the US official that was trying to stop the sale basically saying, ‘Told you so!’
As for the reverse Midas touch, well they’ve already presided over Starfield, which clearly everyone at Microsoft thought was going to be huge but wasn’t. Call Of Duty was put on Game Pass and it made absolutely no difference to how successful it is. In fact, it was right about that time that the Xbox console sales started to tank.
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I honestly don’t think some of these things are Microsoft’s fault. Most everything to do with Game Pass seems like a good idea in theory but in practice people just aren’t interested.
So what’s going to happen if Call Of Duty is, say, half as successful as it used to be? The first thing is hundreds of people are going to lose their jobs, because laying off talented developers comes as easy as breathing to Microsoft execs.
But the higher-ups are going to see this and realise they’re never going to make that $75 billion back. That’s not a small amount of money and I think if they don’t have any other big hits, and next year’s Call Of Duty is also not successful, that’s going to be the thing that finally causes Microsoft to pull the plug on Xbox.
I mean, I just want to type that number out again: $75 billion. Can you imagine? They paid all that money for one franchise and it’s in the toilet two years later. Knowing how long games take to make it’s probably not even Microsoft’s fault, although maybe they shouldn’t have sacked all those Activision marketing people. Especially as I haven’t seen much marketing for Black Ops 7 this year.
I don’t know exactly what Microsoft would do if things go pear shaped. Would they try and sell the whole of Xbox off in one lump or would they break up all the publishers and developers into their separate selves again and sell them off that way? Who other than them even has the money and expertise to buy them?
All I know is that it’s a disaster brewing, that is going to affect the whole games industry in a way we haven’t seen in modern times. It’s funny to point and laugh at Microsoft’s rich execs making dumb mistakes but if this goes badly it’s going to cause so much misery and disruption, to just about everyone except them.
By reader Lossy
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