Activision Blizzard has confirmed that it won’t remove existing games from PlayStation after it has been acquired by Xbox – meaning that games such as Call of Duty: Warzone will seemingly remain multiplatform.
The news comes from an employee Q&A filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In a question asking how the deal between Activision Blizzard and Xbox will impact existing partner agreements, the company stated, “We will honor all existing commitments post close. As with Microsoft’s acquisition of Minecraft, we have no intent to remove any content from platforms where it exists today.”
After Microsoft’s acquisition of Mojang developer Minecraft, the hugely successful game remained on PlayStation consoles, where it can still be played today. That being said, Minecraft has since been added to Xbox Game Pass on both PC and console, and Microsoft has already stated that it plans to bring as many Activision Blizzard games across to the service as possible following the integration.
Microsoft took a similar approach in its acquisition of Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax last year. While games such as Dishonored have remained on PlayStation’s digital stores and are still available for purchase, the series has since also moved onto Game Pass, where it acts as another product to add to the service’s value.
Although Microsoft is yet to unveil which Activision Blizzard IPs it plans to convert into Xbox exclusives, Bethesda’s upcoming release of Starfield – which will debut later this year as an Xbox console exclusive – could signal that PlayStation fans are set to miss out on further content in the years to come.
What that means for Activision’s hugely lucrative Call of Duty franchise still remains to be seen. Given that Call of Duty: Warzone is currently an existing and ongoing product for the company, the statements made by Activision Blizzard above seem to suggest that the game isn’t likely to be removed from PlayStation consoles in the future.
However, that statement doesn’t necessarily cover future Call of Duty releases, which theoretically wouldn’t be covered as content on platforms that already exists today. It could be that, while the free-to-play Warzone remains on PlayStation, new mainline entries in the Call of Duty series are turned into Xbox exclusives, or are released directly into Game Pass to increase the lure of the Xbox versions.
For more recent news from Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, make sure to check out how Sony stock fell by $20 billion dollars the day after the announcement was made.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.