Honestly there is more chance of Xbox buying Nintendo, Sony and Nvidia in one go that them turning COD into a single platform GAAS release.
The opportunity cost of doing so is ridiculously against it. Losing the massive annual revenue guarantee. Risking competition against games that are already well established in the space.
It isn’t happening. Microsoft paid so much for ABK in part because the COD IP is so valuable. It’s so valuable mainly because it sells a bunch every year regardless.
I know people don’t want to accept it but there is an increasing gap between market and business realities and what enthusiast communities think.
I guarantee you that no business thinks let’s invest 69 billion into a company take their biggest IP and change it without a good reason. And making more or new games isn’t a good reason unless you believe those titles are will match the revenue cod makes and there is basically nothing that does that.
If cod has significant decline over the next decade then MS are more likely to reduce headcount or close studios than they are to pivot them to new or even dormant IP.
At best one or two support studios may have some time to work on other projects but beyond that all the ‘get studios off the cod machine’ is completely enthusiast hoping and not really consistent with the realities Xbox are operating in.
They won’t turn it into one platform. But they might move to releasing every other year and give each game two years of support, which maintains a consistent schedule while also freeing up resources for other things and getting ahead of the inevitable future when the CoD schedule collapses. It’s the best of all worlds.
If MS just wants studios to work on new stuff they could have just acquired studios to do that.
I’d like more to be freed up and indeed think for my perspective a cod every two or three years makes sense. But for their business it doesn’t.
The other consideration is competition. A cod every year pretty much locks out any similar title from ever gaining foothold. Why would you make a paid for MP FPS game with all the trappings cod has when you know it’s going to compete with cod and likely fail.
If MS open up schedule gaps for something to sit in then they are simply tempting fate that someone has a go and maybe succeeds in stealing mindshare or attention away.
Not if they invest heavily in the two years of support and keep the community happy so they spend more on MTX and premium DLC.
The development schedule collapsing would be a disaster and it’s going to happen eventually. it’s almost happened twice in recent years with Cold War and MW3 and they were only just able to salvage it. Better to get ahead of it than react to it.
Yeah but I think from stuff I’ve heard it’s harder to in effect have a live service game meaningfully supported resource wise because the work and schedules are much tighter…so you need more manpower to mitigate issues…meaning that you end up back where you started.
I agree that there is a potential for the release cadence to run into issues and I think everyone expects there to be a gap of a year at some point. But that’s rather different I think to just junking the gravy train of an annual release without significant idea what replaces it.
The danger is that a two year gaas is not seen favourably by a community who may well drift back to warzone than pay for year 2 content - something that they are not used to doing and indeed a model that hasn’t really demonstrated any success yet in paid games,…
A lot of the suggestions make a lot of sense if seen from our perspective but I think make less sense business wise.
We’ve seen battlefield as an example really struggle with similar models and whilst I’m not saying the model is the primary problem there it hasn’t helped them.
One of the reasons cod has prevailed in the space is that if one year the game isn’t as liked it gets another completely fresh go the next year. It’s much harder if the game isn’t liked and you are stuck supporting it for two years before the next one and your investors see you pouring a load of resources into a game that isn’t doing so well. Investment and shareholder wise switching to a biannual release will be seen as massively reducing the value of the IP and if you haven’t got something as big to go in that gap I’m not sure it makes business sense.
Warzone is still CoD though. Warzone can help fill the gap between releases.
I understand it would not be an easy decision, or an easy route to take, and maybe they won’t ever do it. But it would be the smarter choice. It would sacrifice shortterm revenue to ensure LONGTERM success of the franchise.
If they take Sledge off CoD and get them making a gigantic AAA new IP, that would pay off significantly in several years. Just as an example of what they could get out of doing this.
“From the creators of Call of Duty” would be an incredible thing to put on a new IP. Like BGS with Starfield.
They aren’t going to move away from the yearly cycle unless they are absolutely forced to
They would literally be losing out on billions every year and they will do everything they can to keep that in place, even if it means hiring 100s, if not 1000s of more devs
Microsoft will be making so much revenue and profits from King and PC side that they don’t need COD to be a yearly release. Besides, COD is a subpar low 70’s rated game every year. How people still play this game is beyond me. Even more so, as someone who never wanted ABK and has zero interest in their games as of right now, all the studios staying with COD pretty much makes this entire company non-existent for me which in my mind is a waste of money.
I want to see all these other studios develop and release other games. If they truly want COD to stay yearly then they should hire hundreds more people for the main four studios that do COD and take all the other studios off of it.
Not going to lie, I hope COD dies so these studios can do other games. And again, money wise, give me a break. Microsoft is worth $2.5T and they now have King/mobile and PC will get stronger for them. How much money do they freaking need? Stop being greedy.
Give the Xbox gamers and fans what they want and they sure as hell don’t want COD every year at the expense of not having all these other games.
All it would take is one Cold War-like situation to happen again, but closer to release so they aren’t able to salvage it at the last minute. If that happened, it would be catastrophic for the franchise and they would have no backup plan, which would lose them even more money.
If they think ahead and plan for future sustainability by moving to every two years, they can ensure that something like that won’t ever happen.
MS are not going throw away billion upon billions every year and sacrifice one of CoDs biggest strengths which is releasing yearly because one game might be bad
What you’re saying is purely hypothetical and besides, releasing yearly means even if they have a terrible game the very next year they can release a new one and all is forgotten, that’s basically what Vanguard was before MW2
Just because MS would be making billions from King does not mean they will or should be willing to throw away billions because you don’t care for CoD, reviews are irrelevant, as evident by how well it does every year, yours or even my opinion doesn’t matter
This I would like to see
They are a business and the reason they are a 2.5b company is not because of logic like this, asking them to throw billions away because they are already rich isn’t how reality works
I’d like more GP games too but again, they are a business, if CoD brings more revenue and GP subs than the others then that’s what they will focus on
Y’all need to think what makes sense business wise and not with your feelings even if it’s not what you want
Can honestly see Activision maintaining like 20k employees to release yearly COD/COD Mobile/Warzone (if it keeps making as much money as it usually does) while having about 1.5 employees work on other projects (Crash, Spyro, etc.). Wouldn’t this be the best compromise?
I agree with everything you said but as a gamer on Xbox, ABK as of right now just doesn’t do anything for me or benefit me in any way. I know reviews don’t matter in regards to COD but I still want the games to be good. Business wise, I get it but again, as an Xbox fan, this acquisition as of now does nothing for me.
I hope it changes but I know it won’t unless the setup of COD changes because until it does, all those other studios are basically just wasting away in my opinion.
I still hope and believe that COD will be a platform next generation because outside of money, why shouldn’t they do that? Besides, with DLC, expansions and micro-transactions, they’ll easily make up the cost plus being a platform eliminates the need to spend money on physical releases every year for every platform which offsets some of the money they would potentially lose even though I don’t see them losing much money because they’ll make it up in so many other ways.
Bulking up massively for yearly CoD while the Beenox’s, Toys for Bobs, VV etc get to work on other IP would be the best compromise for sure
People forget as well that getting a job to work on CoD probably gives you a lot of job security, knowing you’re probably going to be needed constantly for new games pumping out every year is good to have considering the state of the world right now
Id love to see ABK pump out more than just the yearly CoD, getting Crash, Spyro, Tony Hawk and more on a consistent basis would be awesome and I do think with Game Pass, Phil and leadership will try and make things like this happen
I truly hope so. I want a new Crash, Spyro, perhaps seeing the old licensed games get added to Game Pass via BC and im really hoping for a new True Crime game which would be next gen but still, im hoping. Microsoft now owns so many damn IP’s that if they don’t do anything with at least some of them, then it’s like, thanks for nothing Microsoft. lol
Now they’re going to need more studios to develop their huge IP lol
Studios without a major IP like Avalanche, People Can Fly, Asobo, Certain Affinity, Iron Galaxy, Behavior… would probably be happy to work with the Xbox IP. Maybe Microsoft will now move towards talent acquisition?
I’m glad Beenox opened a new studio. This is what I expect from this acquisition. See Toys 4 Bob, Beenox, High Moon and Raven, bring back Prototype, True Crime, Gun, Hexen, Spyro, Crash, Guitar Hero…
