How Sony Won Call of Duty DLC Exclusivity Away From Microsoft

@jenovaschilld: Your argument is valid to a certain degree, but your missing a lot of pieces to the puzzle. Xbox standard publishing license for AAA titles is a flat rate license and then 2.5%, The flat rate is negotiated and is minimal maybe in the few million range, and that's per company not per title.

The most complete sales figures to be reviewed is Call of Duty Ghost which reached 10 Billion in Retail sales. So Microsoft made about $250 million from retail sales. Then subtract the operational cost and infrastructure put in place to support online gaming. While its just a portion of the overall Xbox live operation cost pie, lets throw out a cool $20 million for that so now your at $230 million, now take that and subtract 27% for Advanced warfare and subtract another 27% for Black Ops 3. So if your running financial projections for Microsoft you anticipated take home for Black Ops 3 is $123 million.

To the little people, this would seem to be a lot of money, to the gaming world this is peanuts. I would venture to say that Sony paid $100 million for the exclusive for black ops 3. People forget that while a great game can make 10 billion dollars we are also in an age where creating a AAA title is nearing a Billion just to make and that's before marketing and distribution.

Also as it was proven with Destiny, It showed that DLC exclusivity had minimal impact on retail copies sold, Destiny was a signed DLC exclusive to Sony but more copies were sold for XBOX. If that thought process holds true then why waist the money on paying for content exclusives.

@Hellknite190: The game isn't exclusive though it's still gonna be on xbox so how is it dropped? if anything you lose money paying activision for early dlc and ads when COD is full saturation everyone knows about COD at this point and they dont need ads in thier face to remind them.

@limelight022: COD prior to BO2 to a large extent generated great post sale revenue and each game's life cycle extends way beyond a year sustained by excellent DLC sales. Black Ops2 was probably the first time they started to lose traction with DLC. The garbageGhost and Advance Warfare are both (rightfully) failures. AD being the worse COD released to date.

You know things are bad when Activision has to go back to multiplayer demos just to drum up more users. The last MP demo was World at War.

So yeah COD is still a multi-million franchise but how much of Activision is built upon sustained Cod performance? They have never tapped into Sony's user base like this and the PS4 is doing well. Not to mention the number of ex-360 owners and you have your reason for Activision switch.

@jako998: Hmmm yeah ok. Despite COD haterade with many message board alumni(to be honest I hate COD, always have since they left WW2) It is still the best selling franchise year after year after year. I mean its not even close. So no, they are getting more than "leftovers"

Much as I am concerned...

Extremely short and heavily scripted SP campaign, not much replay value.

Not much changed in MP. Considering that first CoD was awesome because of some (for the time being) massive fights in campaign (I still remember Russian front levels fondly), I was expecting that CoD multiplayer will develop in that direction. More players in match, vehicles, aircrafts... destructive environments? Yes I know I'm basically talking about Battlefield here, but I do prefer that approach to multiplayer, and was hoping back in BF2 days that CoD will be trying to better that formula, rather than sticking to their own, simplified ways.

With all that being said, I have skipped BF4 as well. While I like big battles and vehicles, I has disapointed with BF3 servers renting. I was Premium player from NZ and eventually could not find more than a few official servers where I could play as game was designed to be played, not as god-admins were making out of it for their fun. If game was free to play, that would be kinda OK, but for game I paid full price for, and purchased additional Premium content, I really felt ripped-off.

My last concern was lack of home server. What happens when publisher decides to kill a game? My friends and I still play BF2, L4D on lan parties and online. I would forgive them above mentioned shortcomings have they promised to release home server once they decide to cancel support, but that hasn't happened either.

Thus Planetside 2 is my go-to multiplayer FPS for last 2.5 years, and will be in foreseeable future. Looking forward Division and new Ghost Recon - been missing some fresh co-op lately...

@Brakkyn:

how about.....

Not releasing it every single year and causing general fatigue among the consumer?

@Suikogaiden: completely agree accept its ADHD not ADD and you also forgot 30+ year old virgins