Microsoft Will Let Sony Put Call of Duty on PlayStation Plus on Day One - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 08 March 2023 / 5,323 Views
Microsoft says it has given Sony the option to add Call of Duty games to its PlayStation Plus subscription service on day one.
Microsoft intends to put future Call of Duty games on its Xbox Game Pass subscription services on day one and will let Sony do the same for its own service.
Microsoft states its 10-year offer to Sony will provide parity on "release date, content, features, upgrades, quality and playability with the Xbox platform" on the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and any successor PlayStation console.
"Any CoD Game in a Microsoft multigame subscription is eligible for inclusion in Sony’s multi-game subscription service, at the same time and for the same duration," said Microsoft's response in a newly published report by the UK regulators, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), transcribed by VideoGamesChronicle.
Sony Interactive Entertainment in its own response says the deal to add future Call of Duty games on PlayStation Plus on day one doesn't look as good as is claimed.
Sony Interactive Entertainment says Microsoft will be able to manipulate the price of Call of Duty on PlayStation based on how high it wants to charge for licensing fees.
The company also states that Call of Duty on PlayStation Plus on day one "would commercially destroy SIE’s [multi-game subscription] model." Microsoft will have the ability to "drive up the price for Call of Duty" and Sony will have to " raise the price of [our] MGS service, or not offer Call of Duty on MGS at all."
Sony Interactive Entertainment added, "As a result of the proposal, Call of Duty would become a Game Pass exclusive by default and therefore dominate MGS services in the future."
Sony has yet to sign any deals with Microsoft over Call of Duty or any Activision Blizzard games.
Last month it was announced Microsoft has signed a "binding 10-year legal agreement" to bring Call of Duty games to Nintendo platforms if Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition is approved. The new legally binding agreement will guarantee Call of Duty games will release on Nintendo platforms the same day as Xbox with "full feature and content parity." This is so those on Nintendo platforms "can experience Call of Duty just as Xbox and PlayStation gamers enjoy Call of Duty."
Microsoft and Nvidia have also signed a 10-year partnership to bring Xbox games on PC to the Nvidia GeForce Now cloud gaming service. The agreement will enable gamers to stream Xbox games on PC from GeForce Now to PCs, macOS, Chromebooks, smartphones, and more. If Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal is approved it will bring games from Activision Blizzard to GeForce Now, including Call of Duty.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Sony doesn't want COD on any service Day 1. They want to sell millions of copies at full MSRP every year as they have always done.
I mean they can’t possibly do better than this
I mean... Microsoft is happy to ink a contract that provides:
- Day and date parity of release.
- Graphics parity.
- Inclusion on Playstation Plus!
- 3rd party auditor to ensure quality and consistency across platforms.
-
10 year agreement for the above.
Really hard to make any negative argument against it. - Microsoft's track record of releasing and supporting it's games on Playstation have been fairly positive up to this point I would imagine.
Honestly, it says more about Sony than Microsoft with this mud flinging currently.
lets take the ten year guarantee, and compare it to now, Sony doesn't need a ten year guarantee from Activision because they have 80% of the console COD market. Now graphics parity for the same reason as the 10 year guarantee not an issue, day one on Plus, PlayStation Plus is not Game Pass its not an incentive since Sony wants to sells millions day one at RRP .
Now onto Sony's side, they have gone the polar opposite of the PS360 days of XBOX shooter dominance by investing in COD on their platform and they see the results of that money being well spent, now with MS they see that advantage being eroded away not straight away or fast but slowly over time until 10 years or so down the track a scenario emerges where COD and other titles are used to underpin MS's move away from consoles to fully cloud gaming .
Of course they can, that's the entire reason they're still opposed to it. Will they though, remains to be seen.
How much is the contract going to cost Sony though? I find it frankly astonishing that people are overlooking the biggest factor here; and that's how much Microsoft are going to charge for this 10 year agreement.
Let's say this Contract is $100 Million dollars, is it a good deal still? Of course not. Sony doesn't have to pay anything right now
but what does it offer Sony that beats the status quo
I'm not sure MS understands Sony don't want that. If they allow it to appear on PS+ Premium or even Extra day one it defeats the purpose of having it on the economic system to get revenue from sales. MS might be happy to lose millions in profits of sales of a game to encourage people signing up to their service but Sony aren't. It's the same reason Disney don't make $200million films with $150million advertising budgets just to release them on Disney+ same time as the cinema, when they can make that back and more from cinema releases then add it to Disney plus later for sustained income. Mulan and Black Widow lost a lot of (potential) money.
of course they understand it, they made a good faith effort to show the regulators that they will be fair to Sony, sony replied with nothing
Microsoft gets their merger, Sony makes more money in the meantime as this drama continues unnecessarily, it is a delaying tactic that makes Sony money, time to approve the deal and move on
it is a creative IP deal, there are not even that many companies or employees involved
it's not even invention IP or patents, just creative IP
MSFT adds COD day 1 = no price increase
Sony adds COD day 1 = price increase
The reason is simple. Microsoft’s game studios did not buy ABK, it was bought by Microsoft and the money machine that’s office/windows/azure. Any losses by the games division are absorbed into the other divisions. If Xbox/game pass were a separate company they would struggle to even buy something like Ubisoft or square enix.
The only way complete parity can be enforced is if the financials of game pass are revealed and the cross subsidising of the game studios by the wider Microsoft corporation are blocked.
There is no way regulators can disapprove this deal now. Microsoft is giving Sony everything including the kitchen sink.
No it isn't . They should have offered a deal with no expiry in mind, but in perpetuity. So long as microsoft remains in the game business, they will keep the game open as multiplat. Not 10 yrs and it's over.
I’m not sure if it’s even possible to write a “forever” contract, the closest thing you can do is write up a temporary re-newing contract.. I believe Phil Spencer himself said there are no forever contracts, and then theres the fact that there’s a chance CoD might be less popular in 10 years time.
Contracts like that do exist. It's called " in perpetuity". Which doesn't have an end date. They could have said it "will always be multiplat, and could have had terms thrown in such as " as long xbox risks going bankrupt or no longer making profit and have no choice but to break contract" stuff like that.
But we know their intentions. They want gamepass in every single household . Once those 10 yrs are up, it's bye bye sony. Cod will go exclusive, gamepass and cod will be heavily marketed along with other multiplats. Sony will be forced eventually to adopt gamepass, but imagine trying to play catch up to microsoft. Especially if they have acitivision blizzard aquired. I honestly think this can lead to the demise and end of playstation.
We will just have to see. I very much doubt MS will make CoD exclusive. It doesn't make sense and hurt MS more than they gain. This thought of Playstations demise is greatly exaggerated, even if CoD did become exclusive.
Ofcourse microsoft wants sony to add the game to ps plus , or any service on playstation. They want as much exposure gor the game as possible, so when the 10 yrs is up, microsoft will say sorry, deal is over" and then you have ps5/ps6 cod install base of 10/15 million who will have no choice but to switch over to xbox.
Sony don't want that,
Why would Microsoft offer that lol.
The answer to your question is on your first sentence..
I doubt they would want to do that anyway. What they're mostly interested in if I were to guess is marketing rights for CoD.
My bet is that they would rather want concession for Xbox not to add CoD on GP than having the option to do it themselves. They probably fears their users start asking the question "if Sony is able to deal to have CoD day 1 on ps+ how come they cannot do the same with their 1st party titles".
sony wants millions of that 30% cut not have to pay Microsoft alot of money to have it on the service but then again it will get millions more subscribe to PS Extra if they did
Sony's response basically indicates that they want CoD on PS Plus mid tier for free, without having to pay to compensate Xbox for the potential millions of lost day one, full priced CoD purchases. Absolute buffoonery.
Xbox is willing to take the loss in day one full priced purchases to grow Gamepass' subscriber base, they have done so time and time again with their own 1st and 2nd party exclusives and quite alot of day one 3rd party games on Gamepass. Sony meanwhile is clearly not willing to pay to do the same, they aren't putting their own 1st and 2nd party games into PS Plus mid tier day one, instead waiting about a year to add them, and they have only put a small handful of 3rd party games like Fall Guys day one into PS Plus. They want the regulators to tell Xbox that they can't put CoD day one into Gamepass after they own it, simply because they themselves are unwilling to pay to put CoD day one into PS Plus mid tier.
I think ultimately Sony's point here is that MS will always have a way of leveraging the COD IP to gain an advantage. Sony's main argument is the extent of influence on the COD brand as a whole - I don't see them relenting on any of the smaller details around 10 year deals or bringing COD to PS+. Their main aim is to block the transaction completely, if that fails maybe then they will take what they can in terms of a compromise.
From a Sony perspective I agree with the approach. Sony knows how much revenue COD brings in - its likely invaluable to them.
Their latest whinge is that ms may purposefully sabotage ps version of cod and release a buggy one. This is an actual fact 🤣
I didn't read it as them wanting it for free, as they are not getting any other third party deals on PS Plus for free either. Rather, they probably don't want to go above the usual rate they pay for big games they put on there a year+ later. But I don't think they want to do that either, because they'd lose out on a lot of sales since PS Plus is something a lot of people already have to play games online. Would CoD Day 1 do much for their PS Plus userbase? Probably not, and even then, that would just be for one month. So they are insinuating that MS can increase the price to an unreasonable amount to avoid that scenario, imo.
No, they're looking at the hundreds of millions in lost revenue every year by losing out on the royalties of physical and digital sales.
So Sony wany to have CoD as IT is right now. Ok then...MS just give them all they Ask for. They own it.
It's funny how Sony is afraid of others doing what they themselves have been doing for decades.
Well, look at where it brought them :) They are not stupid haha
Nope. Sony hasn't bought publishers with many studios/IPs behind them before. Not to say that they haven't engaged in shady practices (much like Microsoft, Nintendo, and SEGA have all done), but a situation like the Activision-Blizzard deal with all included variables has never happened before.
