This talk of CoD and or other Activision/Blizzard games on Playstation after June 2023 is laughable… people really are in denial. It will be the same as they did with Bethesda games. Not unless Sony MS strike a deal … likely Gamepass on PS or non exclusivity for Sonys big games. Why spend 70 Billion to be nice to Sony? This is corporate warfare !
And for those still wihning about monopoly… nobody stopped MS with Windows or Google with Android/Browsers… or even Sony somewhat in music publishing… why stop now?
Mythical man month. You can’t just give a studio a bunch of money and ask them to produce more games. It takes time to spin up, to hire people, to train them, etc.
I mean, if Sony and ATVI have some contractual arrangements that guarantee CoD games on PlayStation platforms until let’s say 2025, then Microsoft will have to honor that or buy their way out. The same way they honored the Deathloop agreement Sony and Bethesda had. Admittedly, Deathloop was unlikely to be a system seller, so MS didn’t have a lot of incentive to send a load of cash towards Sony.
That said, yeah, after contractual obligations are over, I don’t think it’ll be business as usual for CoD.
Someone on reddit did the math and figured that the financial hit of COD leaving PS isn’t that damaging for MS, because they just need to convert a modest % of PS owners to Xbox or Gamepass customers to make up the difference.
That’s because you can say COD sells 10 million on PlayStation. At $55 a pop (retail usually gets $5), that $550 million. But all of that isn’t going to ATVI. Sony was getting its platform cut. So take out Sony’s platform tax and you get something like $400 million. Still sizeable. But if you get 2 million new Game Pass members at $15/month, that’s $30 million/month and $360 million year. 3 million new GP subscribers is $540 million/year.
Lots of good articles about the King’s Quest titles (liberally sprinkled with dunking on Roberta Williams’s adventure-design chops) from the Digital Antiquarian, by the way. I’ve never played a KQ game for more than 5 minutes but I enjoyed reading them anyway.
One of the first games I ever owned for my PC, when I was a little kid, was King’s quest 3… And I played that game for ages before I figured it you had to lie down next to the tree, and reach into the hole in it, which was essentially only indicated by like 5 slightly different colored pixels on the tree.
Yup. Nintendo has complete dominance of non strategy games in my ‘favorite games of all time’ list, and if I looked at titles for this console generation Nintendo blows Sony and Microsoft’s offerings away by a landslide.
Only Paradox, Firaxis, and Creative Assembly are in the same ballpark for me.
