Xbox chief Phil Spencer has confirmed that the company will not be stuffing future Call of Duty games with Xbox-exclusive content.

If Xbox successfully acquires Activision Blizzard and the Call of Duty franchise, Phil Spencer says PlayStation players won’t have to worry about missing out on content. Console exclusivity for specific content or games is one of the main ways PlayStation and Xbox compete. Companies are spending money to ensure timed exclusives for their platforms. A recent example of this was the highly successful open-world Harry Potter action RPG Hogwarts Legacy.

Hogwarts Legacy offers pretty much the same experience regardless of what platform people play it on, with one big exception.

Players of Hogwarts Legacy on the PlayStation console can participate in a horror-themed quest exclusive. This quest is expected to be available exclusively to PS4 and PS5 players for a year, as Xbox head Phil Spencer cited as an example in a recent interview with Xbox On. He confirmed that Xbox would not pull a similar move to Call of Duty if it were to gain control of the IP.

In the Xbox On interview, Spencer stated that Xbox wants to increase the number of places where people can play Call of Duty. “You obviously don’t make a game bigger by taking it away from anyone that’s playing today,” Spencer said, pointing out that 58 games from Xbox’s portfolio are already available on the PlayStation Store. Spencer was then asked about the possibility of exclusive content for Call of Duty players on Xbox if the acquisition is successful, but he clarified that this would not be the case. Citing the PlayStation-exclusive mission of Hogwarts Legacy as an example, Spencer said that’s “not the game we’re trying to play here.”

Phil Spencer acknowledged that exclusive content is “part of the industry”, but Xbox is not seeking to make weapon skins or specific game modes exclusive to Xbox for the Call of Duty franchise.

He said that “the same version” of the game will be available on all platforms and pointed out that Xbox already does this with multiplatform games.

It’s worth pointing out that Sony and Xbox have both provided exclusive Call of Duty content for their consoles in the past. There was a time when Call of Duty DLCs were available for an entire month on Xbox. PlayStation players could only get them after that. And the most recent Call of Duty games on PlayStation had exclusive game modes for an entire year. This practice seems to end if Xbox succeeds in acquiring Activision Blizzard. But the proposed acquisition still has some significant regulatory hurdles to overcome.

Source: Archyde