Battle.net’s lack of growth during CoD’s exclusivity might’ve been more of a Blizzard problem, though.
Activision Blizzard stopped releasing new Call of Duty games on Steam in 2018, opting to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and future CoDs exclusive to Blizzard’s Battle.net platform. According to Microsoft’s lawyers, that move was a « resounding failure » that did not lead to Battle.net’s growth. That might be a slight exaggeration.
Call of Duty remained exclusive to Battle.net on PC until last year, when Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0 released on Steam. Modern Warfare 2 is still one of Steam’s top 10 bestsellers by revenue today, as well as one of the top 10 most-played games on Steam by daily users, so the series is clearly doing well back in Gabe’s embrace.
In a court document filed today (related to the recent hearing over Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard), Microsoft’s legal team affirms the notion that Call of Duty’s Battle.net exclusivity ended because it wasn’t doing the numbers they’d hoped for.
« Activision’s attempt to take PC digital sales of Call of Duty exclusive to its Battle.net platform was a resounding failure, » reads part of a document. « Before 2018, Activision sold digital versions of PC Call of Duty titles on Valve’s successful Steam platform. In 2018, Activision decided to take the game off of Steam and make it exclusively available on Battle.net—largely in an effort to attract users to, and grow, Activision’s own platform.
