With Battlefield 6 looking like a major success, a reader explores what might happen if it’s a hit and this year’s Call Of Duty is a failure – and what that means for Xbox.
I’ve been following the hype levels of Battlefield 6 for the last few weeks and it’s clear it’s going to be a massive hit. Whether it’s massive enough for EA I don’t know, because I don’t know what you even do when you willingly saddle yourself with $20 billion of debt for no reason. That’s a different problem though, because what I want to talk about is what happens to Activision if Battlefield kills off or severely puts a dent in Call Of Duty?
What happens to Xbox if the company they just bought for $75+ billion, and which basically only makes one product, manages to kill their golden goose? I’ll try and be a bit more insightful in a minute but the short answer to that is a total frickin’ disaster.
For decades, people have been saying Activision is stupid for only having one franchise, when they had all the time and money in the world to create back-ups. But no, they thought it was better to put all their eggs in one basket and then sit on their heels. It seemed obvious that would come back to bite them at some point, but now Activision’s problem is Xbox’s problem.
I should say, first of all, I don’t expect Battlefield 6 to completely blow Call Of Duty out of the water at launch. Black Ops 7 will still probably outsell it overall but a new Call Of Duty comes out every year and so there’s never really any chance for it to make up for a mistake, or take advantage of an especially big hit.
But Battlefield 6 is going to be around for years and will likely get more and more popular over time, as usually happens with live service games, which Call Of Duty kind of is but kind of isn’t, since it resets every 12 months. (Remember when Microsoft were hinting they were going to put a stop to that? Come to that, remember when they said they were going to make Switch versions of the games?)
The question here, is whether Battlefield will just be a temporary hit – maybe a lot of people interested in the game don’t realise how unfriendly it can be yet – or if it’ll become the next big thing. If it’s the latter, then Activision are in serious trouble.
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We’ve already seen them panic by giving Black Ops 6 away free this week but one of the many problems for them is that they have to set these games in motion a long time ahead of schedule, so the next two or three Call Of Duty games are already in production and the next two, at least, are going to be impossible to make any serious changes to.
So if Battlefield 6 is massive then it has got a big window to take advantage of it and really embed itself as a new favourite. And when it does there’s pretty much nothing Activision can do. I imagine they’ll try price cuts and free DLC and that sort of thing, but I don’t think that’s going to make much difference.
If they can’t make a comeback, and I admit that is a pretty big if, then suddenly Microsoft paid all that money for literally nothing. There’s still Blizzard stuff but I’m not sure anything except World Of Warcraft is doing that great nowadays.
The Microsoft execs above Xbox aren’t going to stand for that, they’ll want to sell off Activision as soon as possible. And if they go to that extreme, they’ll probably decide to throw the towel in for Xbox as a whole. I’m not saying things getting that bad is likely, at least not any time soon, but if Activision goes down, I’m certain that will be it for gaming as far as Microsoft is concerned.
And then where will the games industry be? All those developers and publishers being sold off at cut price rates, while all the talented people leave and are scattered to the winds. It’s a worse case scenario but it’s still one that could happen. Boy, this generation has been such a disaster…
By reader Campbell
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