A redacted document from the ongoing Microsoft vs. FTC hearing revealed just how many PlayStation gamers only use their consoles to play Call of Duty today, according to a report by The Verge.
“About one million users spent 100 percent of their gaming time on Call of Duty” in 2021, according to the document. And absolutely nothing else. That means they didn’t even download a demo or try out a free PlayStation Plus game. It’s all CoD, all the time for at least one million gamers on PS5 and PS4.
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So, how did this information come out? Apparently, when documents redacted with a Sharpie are scanned, the text underneath the marked areas can then be read, so a ton of information that Sony didn’t want out in the open is now available in the document.
“In 2021, Call of Duty players spent an average of [116?] hours per year playing Call of Duty,” The Verge guessed its viewing of the document said. “Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise.”
CoD’s importance to PlayStation is clear from the document, too, which says that CoD alone was worth about $800 million in the US alone for the company during 2021, and The Verge says it works out to about $1.5 billion globally. Meanwhile, MW2 was confirmed to “set new franchise sales records” by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick earlier in the day, so that annual number may be even higher now.
The document also revealed shocking development costs for PlayStation games like The Last of Us: Part II and Horizon Forbidden West, with both clocking in at well over $200 million.
It’s now pretty plain to see why Sony is fighting against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, because if CoD were to go exclusive and leave PlayStation, that would be quite a chunk of change off of their books for the foreseeable future.
Elsewhere in today’s court proceedings, Kotick said that he was not interested in bringing CoD to Xbox Game Pass on day one because it’s “not a good business decision,” even if the $69 billion acquisition goes through.
