microsoft: After the biggest gaming deal, Activision may have new ‘Call of Duty’ plans – Times of India

Activision may be thinking of going easy on Call of Duty releases every year and could ditch the yearly release schedule of the first person shooter series, as per a report by Bloomberg. Although nothing has been finalised yet, the US-based game company is having talks at the high-level, says the report.
Call of Duty: Vanguard, the latest game in the franchise, has underperformed when it comes to overall sales and as per the report, employees within the company are of the view that the launches need to be spread out more to sustain and reinvigorate the interest of the players worldwide. Since Call of Duty is one of the most widely known gaming franchises, it should not hurt the company if it plans to space out the launches, as it has other big gaming franchises too like World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo etc. and popular games like Candy Crush. As per the report, Activision Blizzard may start with the new rule for spacing out Call of Duty launches from next year itself.
Activision Blizzard was recently acquired by none other than Microsoft in its biggest-ever acquisition for $68.7 billion, which also made the deal the biggest-ever in the history of gaming. The deal with Activision Blizzard is bigger than Microsoft’s $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn. It also broke the record set by Take-Two Interactive’s acquisition of mobile game publisher Zynga for more than $11 billion. With this acquisition, Microsoft has now got the rights to publish all the games made by Activision and its subsidiaries as exclusives. However, Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer recently said in a tweet that Call of Duty will remain on PlayStation.