None of this is plausible since any deal will involve Microsoft guaranteeing long term access to Call of Duty on PlayStation, in a legally binding contract ratified and enforced by the EU.
The problem here is what's defined as "long-term". Clearly Sony don't think a 10-year deal is long-term, especially if the terms of the deal are not satisfactory. The fact there are aspects to the deal offer Microsoft don't want mentioned publicly, and the fact they are dodging the FTC's request to provide the deal's writing in full, suggests at least some parts of the deal which would be viewed as unsatisfactory by certain companies with resistance to the acquisition and even to regulatory bodies.
Your scenario also fails to cover the potential long term damage to the Call of Duty brand if it went exclusive to Xbox. Most users won’t ditch PlayStation, and we know Sony’s been hard at work at multiple GaaS rivals.
Hey, I worked with
feynoob
's own numbers in their own scenario and those didn't end up working for the point they were trying to argue, because in some scenario where out of 10 million PS users, 4 million leave COD if it's withdrawn from the console and even just half of the 6 million who move subscribe to Game Pass, that is Game Pass revenue increase directly attributable to COD's availability in the service, so you can essentially classify that as COD revenue.
And that combination of new GP revenue due to COD and the 3 million who'd choose to just buy the game at launch, still grants Microsoft a lot more revenue without PlayStation than if they kept the game on PlayStation. But I'm just giving a logical conclusion to the incomplete example
feynoob
provided earlier.
After seeing how Halo fell from crazy heights of 1 million + player CCUs to the struggles of Infinite, I doubt there’d be anyone willing to take the risk of having COD suffer a similar fate.
Except the problems with Halo Infinite were having a HORRIBLE content rollout, underwhelming visuals, arguably uninspired campaign (certainly in terms of biome variety), lack of features at launch and poor rollout of community features combined with some MP sync issues and bad MTX pricing practices for the store.
Historically, the COD teams have avoided all of those problems for both the annual releases and Warzone. They have lots of content at launch, regular content updates at good intervals, nice visuals, generally good campaigns (recent ones like MW2 being big favorites), strong netcode and sync etc. COD has very few if any of the risk factors for CCU death spirals and sales falling off the cliff the way Halo's experienced gradually since 343i's takeover.
And accelerated at record pace with Halo Infinite, FWIW.
EDIT: Also Halo was always an exclusive franchise so trying to use its decline as a reason for why COD being removed from PlayStation makes no sense for Microsoft to do, in itself makes no sense because Halo was easily the
biggest FPS in the console space for several years while ALSO being an Xbox exclusive (with later PC ports)!
