Sony accidentally reveals PlayStation’s Call of Duty data

Updated

Activision

Sony fears that Activision and Microsoft will make Call of Duty an exclusive, cutting its revenue significantly.

According to court documents presented during the FTC v. Microsoft trial, one million PlayStation players exclusively play Call of Duty (COD) on the platform, with the franchise's revenue exceeding $800 million in 2021.

The details:

Despite a poor attempt at redacting sensitive details in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from Sony CEO Jim Ryan (via The Verge), the company has inadvertently revealed data regarding the shooter franchise's impact on the PlayStation platform. According to the letter, in 2021 alone, "over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30% or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty.”
During the same period, COD generated approximately $800 million on PlayStation in the United States alone, and approximately $1.5 billion globally, according to the same document. Between 2019 and 2021, the players in the aforementioned group spent approximately $15.9 billion on PlayStation hardware, accessories, games, and services. Sony previously confirmed in March that COD would contribute more than $1 billion in sales on its platform by 2021.
Sony's reasoning for disclosing this information to the court is to demonstrate that losing COD on the PlayStation system would have a significant impact on its revenue, citing similar fears and even the possibility of making the titles technically worse compared to the same releases on Xbox and PC. Furthermore, Activision's existing marketing agreement with Sony will expire with the release of the 2023 entry (rumored to be Modern Warfare III).

More Call of Duty news:

Activision has announced that the original Warzone, now known as Warzone Caldera, will be discontinued in September. The shutdown will allow the publisher's teams to "focus on future Call of Duty content, including the current Warzone free-to-play experience," with the release of Warzone Mobile also imminent.
Images of the classic Call of Duty maps Scrapyard and Terminal from the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III have leaked online. Although the legitimacy of the images has not been confirmed, insiders claim to have seen "similar" images earlier in development.