Phil Spencer Wants More People Playing Call of Duty but Avoids Exclusivity Question

Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has said that he wants more people playing Call of Duty than ever before and make Starfield “the most-played Todd Howard game ever.” However, he avoided answering how Microsoft plans to achieve that considering the latter is exclusive to its ecosystem and there are rumors that Call of Duty will eventually become exclusive as well.

Speaking to Axios’ Stephen Totillo, Spencer said that he understands where the concerns come from but when quizzed about exclusivity, he gave somewhat of a diplomatic answer and said that he’s only focused on the present for now.

Will Call of Duty become Xbox exclusive?

Spencer refuses to answer that, having only expressed his “desire to keep Call of Duty” on PlayStation platforms. There’s also no indication that Starfield will ever make its way to PlayStation. He also reminded Totillo that he’s an executive in charge of a business after all.

“Yeah, I want more people to be playing WoW in five years that are playing today, I want more people to be playing Call of Duty in five years, more people to be playing Candy Crush in five years, because we’ve made it more accessible to more people,” Spencer said. “[People ask] ‘When is the Game Pass price going to go up? They’re buying all these studios. You know, it’s inevitable.’ But it’s like, ‘You know, it’s coming – when they are number one, they’re going to start doing all those exclusive deals that, like, you know, Xbox has history’ and all I can do is is make the decisions that are in front of us and try to be explicit about what our goals are.”

Something that stood out to me when I recently interviewed Phil Spencer was his emphasis on rising player counts, which I think is key to understanding Microsoft’s strategy.

I want to share where that conversation went (warning: this will be a bunch of tweets!)

— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) February 8, 2022

Opinion: Game Pass on PlayStation isn’t too far-fetched

Zarmena writes… I remain convinced like many others that Microsoft wants to bring Game Pass or a similar subscription service to rival platforms including PlayStation. It’ll help rake in the kind of gaming revenue that’ll bump Microsoft up from its third position in the games industry. Whether Sony will be receptive to the idea or not remains to be seen (likely not). Spencer is no stranger to making vague statements, but as he said, he’s a businessman after all and that’s what he’s supposed to do. Time will tell whether future Call of Duty games come to PlayStation or not.

In other news, Battlefield 2042 players are demanding refunds, and Bandai Namco wants to build an IP metaverse.

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