In a way, it makes sense: this way, Battlefield could be more successful, as Activision Blizzard’s IP would miss out on the PlayStation platform(s).

While Microsoft keeps saying that they have no intention of taking Call of Duty away from Sony if the Redmond-based tech company gets the chance to acquire Activision Blizzard, Sony keeps opposing the acquisition (while we wrote about it, Meta had given its blessing to the deal). Still, we haven’t seen much comment from a rival company, as Electronic Arts’ franchise Battlefield used to be a rival to Call of Duty. Still, Battlefield 2042 didn’t stand much of a chance against Call of Duty: Vanguard (so it’s no wonder that Respawn founder Vince Zampella is now in charge of the franchise…).

Speaking recently at a Goldman Sachs event, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson backed Microsoft’s acquisition, saying: “I don’t think we delivered in the last two iterations of that in the way that we should have. There’s a lot of work that we’ve got to do there. But at its very core, this is a unique IP. And what we’ve seen in entertainment is that great IP is resilient. We’ve seen movies not live up to the expectations of franchises. Star Wars might be one such franchise. And then you can see what happens when you get the right creative team involved, how they can completely reinvent and grow a franchise.

And I think we now have an extraordinary creative team involved in Battlefield who have unbelievable ambitions to own the first-person shooter space. In a world where there may be questions over the future of Call of Duty and what platforms might be on or might not be on, being platform agnostic and utterly cross-platform with Battlefield, I think is a tremendous opportunity,” Wilson said.

So it’s in their interest to support Call of Duty’s hoped-for departure from PlayStation because they believe Battlefield will be able to fill the void left by CoD. The question is, on the one hand, will it happen, and on the other, will fans switch to this IP…?

Source: PCGamer