Call of Duty will stay on PlayStation, Xbox chief reiterates

Despite ongoing concerns over Microsoft’s pending buyout of Activision Blizzard, Xbox chief Phil Spencer says Call of Duty will remain on PlayStation.

While that’s the line that Microsoft has been leading with for months now, it bears repeating as the proposed buyout of Activision Blizzard continues to be put under the microscope. The purchase is still being checked over by authorities to ensure that it isn’t anti-competitive, but Microsoft’s keen to make sure everyone knows that it intends to keep the high-profile Call of Duty franchise as a cross-platform one, not something locked down to its own hardware.

Speaking in an interview with the Same Brain podcast, Spencer said that “as long as there’s a PlayStation out there to ship to, our intent is that we continue to ship Call of Duty on PlayStation”. That seems pretty cut and dried, but Spencer sought to drive the point home by pointing at Minecraft.

Spencer says that the idea is that Call of Duty would follow the Minecraft model – Microsoft has continued to support the game on various platforms, including Sony’s PlayStation, long after buying it for $2.5 billion in 2014.

Call of Duty is a huge series and the latest Modern Warfare 2 game only went on sale a few days ago. The title is, of course, cross-platform and that is something that PlayStation fans will hope continues even if the Microsoft buyout goes through. At this point, Microsoft has been clear that it will, but few are likely to believe it until it actually happens.