According to the game media Kotaku reported, in the Activision Blizzard acquisition case, the court exposed a new document showing that Microsoft believes that “Call of Duty” to leave the Steam platform, the whole body injected into the “development of Battle.net” This initiative is a complete failure behaviour.
▲ Figure source Court documents 2018, Activision announced that the PC version of the “Call of Duty: Black Ops 4” is no longer on the Steam gaming platform, and is only released on the Battle.net under its banner. Activision also continued the strategy in the following years and only released Call of Duty: WWII on Steam in 2022.
▲ Official Call of Duty poster
▲ Official Call of Duty Poster
But for Call of Duty: WWII, Microsoft believes that this is not a “good deed” that Activision is considering for gamers, but rather a failure of Activision Blizzard’s Battle.net development program.
During the period when Call of Duty wasn’t on Steam, Battle.net’s growth was slow, but the overall number of users on Steam continued to grow, with the number of monthly active users increasing from 67 million in 2017 to 132 million in 2021.
In its July 13th court filing, Microsoft cites these examples as proof that owning Call of Duty does not guarantee success for a platform. Microsoft’s legal team said that even if Call of Duty became exclusive to Xbox, it wouldn’t matter because there are already platforms that have been successful without Call of Duty.
