The Xbox boss justified leaving Call of Duty as a multiplatform (if Microsoft can own Activision Blizzard) with something he did with Starfield…

Phil Spencer was interviewed by Xbox On this time (he told The Times yesterday that Xbox will exist without Activision Blizzard), and he tried to explain that Starfield was made exclusive by Microsoft because it was a new IP. In contrast, Call of Duty would be taken away from PlayStation players. Except they’ve taken Todd Howard’s new game out of their hands, so that has no sense…

“I never said Starfield wouldn’t be exclusive to Xbox. I think what I said is we’re going to take it on a case-by-case basis. We’re not going to pull games that are on other platforms. […] Exclusive titles in the console space are part of the business. All platform holders do it. They are marketing beats for the platform. Our competitors have a lot of exclusive games. So, when we’re launching new games, there are certain games that we’re going to make… ‘exclusive’ for us is always a little bit hard because we ship everything on PC as well, but let’s just say ship on Xbox, PC, and playable on the cloud. Some of those won’t be available on other competitive platforms. There’s no example in Bethesda of us pulling something away from the PlayStation community that they had. Or of games people are playing, us not continuing to update those. Same thing with Minecraft, Minecraft Dungeons, and we’ll do the same thing with [Minecraft] Legends when it comes out,” Spencer said.

Then we would ask, what about DOOM or The Elder Scrolls, for example? The former is something id Software is likely continuing after DOOM Eternal, while Howard’s at Bethesda Game Studios will do TES VI after Starfield. Both IPs have been multiplatform (in the console aspect) so far. Will Spencer’s vision hold up here too? We think not.

Source: WCCFTech