Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for nearly $68 billion, and with a deal of this unprecedented scale, there are obviously going to be many questions about how significantly the entire industry at large is going to be impacted. Part of that is whether or not Microsoft is going to turn any and all future Activision Blizzard releases – which includes the likes of Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Diablo, among many others – into Xbox and PC exclusive titles, the way it has done with Bethesda since the ZeniMax acquisition.
While that’s not going to become entirely clear until the Xbox-Activision deal is finalized, which will be in fiscal year 2023, Xbox boss Phil Spencer has seemingly suggested that not all Activision Blizzard games will leave PlayStation entirely. As reported by Bloomberg, speaking in an interview, Spencer said, “I’ll just say to players out there who are playing Activision Blizzard games on Sony’s platform: It’s not our intent to pull communities away from that platform and we remained committed to that.”
Bloomberg has also claimed in its report that according to their sources who are familiar with the situation, “some” Activision Blizzard games are going to be kept exclusive to Xbox, while others will remain multiplatform. Read more on that through here.
Of course, it’s worth remembering that this is very much along the same lines as what Phil Spencer and Xbox had said about future Bethesda games when that deal was first announced, stating that exclusivity would be decided for games on a case-by-case basis and that Bethesda content wouldn’t just be pulled from PlayStation or Nintendo platforms. It remains to be seen whether the Activision Blizzard purchase will follow the same path.
