Activision Blizzard stopped releasing new Call of Duty games on Steam in 2018, opting to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 exclusive to Blizzard's PC platform Battle.net. This store exclusivity strategy ended just last year with Modern Warfare 2, but according to Microsoft's lawyers, the strategy was a "disaster." However, that may be a bit of an exaggeration.

In court documents filed today (related to the recent hearing over Microsoft's pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard), Microsoft's lawyers argue that Call of Duty's Battle.net exclusivity ended because Activision Blizzard was not performing as expected While affirming the notion that the reason for the termination of Activision Blizzard's exclusivity to Battle.net was because it did not perform as expected, success is stated in terms of Battle.net's success, not CoD's success, which leads to a bit of a quibble.

"Activision's attempt to make the PC digital sales of Call of Duty exclusive to the Battle.net platform was a disaster." Prior to 2018, Activision sold digital versions of its PC "Call of Duty" titles on Valve's successful Steam platform; in 2018, Activision decided to take the game off Steam and sell it exclusively on Battle.net The game is now available exclusively on Battle.net. This was primarily to attract and grow users to Activision's own platform. battle.net's monthly active users ("MAUs") remained relatively flat from 2018 to 2022, when it had exclusive access to digital sales of the PC version of Call of Duty. remained relatively flat throughout the period during which it was available."

We were surprised that Battle.net's monthly active users did not grow while CoD was exclusively available. While the pandemic kept people indoors, most online services grew in 2020, and the first CoD: Warzone, released in March 2020, was a huge success. at the end of 2020, Activision Blizzard reached 100 million monthly active users, a "Call of Duty" franchise with 100 million monthly active users. The company's PC sales increased by 20% that year, so a large portion of those users must have been on Battle.net. Clearly, Call of Duty's Battle.net exclusivity increased the number of Battle.net users. So why didn't it grow?

The alleged stagnation of Battle.net during the CoD exclusivity seems more attributable to Blizzard than to Call of Duty: the monthly active users of Blizzard games dropped from 35 million at the end of 2018 to 22 million at the end of 2021, a loss of 13 million. Apparently, Battle.net's active user count was enough to keep it "relatively flat" despite Warzone's explosive popularity.

Things are different now: according to the company's quarterly earnings report, Blizzard games recovered to 45 million monthly active users in the last quarter of 2023. That number dropped to 27 million in the first quarter of this year, but that was before Diablo 4 was released, and Diablo 4 has certainly helped that number rebound; while not all of Blizzard's players are on Battle.net (for example, mobile If Call of Duty was still exclusive to Battle.net when Diablo 4 was released, Microsoft would not be able to claim that the service did not grow at all during the exclusivity period. Microsoft would not be able to claim that the service did not grow at all during the exclusivity period. [It's a pretty clever move by Activision to release Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 on Steam at a time when they point out that Battle.net did not grow while the PC version of CoD was exclusive to Battle.net. In case you didn't know, Microsoft and Activision have been trying to convince regulators and judges around the world that they have no intention of making Call of Duty an Xbox exclusive after Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard and the availability of Call of Duty It is part of their strategy to point out that Activision's previous efforts to restrict the availability of Call of Duty were foolish. They also say it was a mistake not to bring Call of Duty to the Nintendo DS.

It was definitely a mistake, and it is not hard to believe that Call of Duty's Battle.net exclusivity really hampered it, especially considering how well it is doing on Steam. More than six months after its release, Modern Warfare 2 is still one of Steam's top 10 bestsellers in terms of sales and one of the top 10 most played games on Steam. It is clear that the series is doing well under Gabe's embrace, and Activision is not the only company that has recently crawled back onto Steam.

Microsoft's attempt to buy Activision Blizzard is going to happen after all. A judge recently denied the FTC's request for an injunction to temporarily block the deal, and as a result, the previously blocking British regulators are now willing to talk about a compromise.