PlayStation and Call of Duty’s lengthy partnership has finally come to an end. Call of Duty is a series that drives billions of dollars in revenue. It’s consistently the best selling game of the year it releases in with the exception of when Rockstar Games releases a rare game and in 2023 when Hogwarts Legacy managed to beat out Modern Warfare III. Nevertheless, it’s a franchise that sells and is only ever beaten out by anomalies that shatter all kinds of records in their own right. It’s a pretty impressive juggernaut that has yet to tumble and it’s why a lot of companies partner up with Call of Duty. Mountain Dew, Doritos, Monster, Totinos, Little Caesars, and more have all worked with Call of Duty in some capacity over the years as part of an elaborate marketing push for the annual Call of Duty releases.
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However, the biggest partnership for Call of Duty has always been with the platform Activision chooses to enter into an expensive agreement with. Xbox had a long relationship with Call of Duty long before Microsoft ever acquired Activision for a cool $70 billion. Call of Duty 2 was exclusive to Xbox 360 (Big Red One was a different game available on PS2) and never came to PS3, as it released a year after the Xbox 360. Xbox then worked with Activision to create a lucrative marketing deal for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007 and continued until 2015. This allowed Xbox users the ability to get DLC a month before other platforms along with other exclusive content and resulted in Xbox also being able to debut the first gameplay for new Call of Duty games like Modern Warfare 3. It was a historic partnership, but one that came to an abrupt, surprise ending in 2015.
PlayStation managed to steal the marketing rights for Call of Duty with Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. This resulted in early map packs for PlayStation players as well as early access to betas for years. After Call of Duty ditched map packs in favor of free seasonal content drops, PlayStation players were offered exclusive operators and bundles that wouldn’t make their way to Xbox and PC for a full year. At that point, it rendered them somewhat meaningless as the next Call of Duty game would be out and players would have moved on.
Microsoft promised to honor any existing deals PlayStation had with Call of Duty after its acquisition and now, the deal with PlayStation has finally come to an end. As noted by CharlieIntel, PlayStation exclusive operator and combat packs for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III saw its exclusivity expire on November 9th. It’s expected to come to Xbox and PC sometime in the near future now, but this also means the end of the PlayStation partnership. It was the last piece of exclusive content between Call of Duty and PlayStation. Microsoft has sworn to have parity between Xbox, PlayStation, and other platforms for Call of Duty going forward, meaning there won’t be exclusive betas, maps, or other content on Xbox or any other platform.
Of course, there is one slight exception to that. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is available at no extra cost to Xbox Game Pass subscribers on Xbox and PC. That is a pretty huge upper hand to PlayStation, but one that had to be expected and is likely a big reason why Microsoft was so willing to invest a huge chunk of change into Activision. The recent launch set records for both Xbox and Call of Duty with record-setting numbers for Xbox Game Pass sign-ups as well as massive player counts for Black Ops 6. It seems like that will be more than enough to keep Microsoft satisfied and not feel remotely tempted to feature some other kind of exclusive content. It also means Xbox can once again make a big spectacle out of having the first gameplay of new Call of Duty games at its E3 showcases in the future.
