Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 proves Xbox has a reverse Midas touch – Reader Features

With this year’s Call Of Duty underperforming to an alarming degree, readers are worried about the impact this will have on Activision and the future of Xbox.

Normally I would claim that I’m pretty neutral when it comes to Xbox versus PlayStation, but I have to say that there’s a part of me that really enjoys knowing that you can’t buy success. Microsoft has been in the gaming business for almost 25 years and it seems fair to say that it hasn’t gone well for them.

Whether they abandon the hardware or not doesn’t really matter at this stage, because no one is buying an Xbox Series

Despite controlling half the gaming industry, they can’t seem to put out award-winning games or get anyone to buy their consoles. And now they seem to have ruined Call Of Duty, just two years after buying Activision. At first it seemed cute, but I worry what will happen to them now.

Activision Blizzard cost Microsoft $75.4 billion. Microsoft said a lot of things when they bought it that haven’t come true, saying that they were actually buying it for mobile publisher King and that they would bring more games to the Switch. They also said they would not raise prices. But none of these things happened.

No Activision Blizzard games were released on the Switch, King didn’t appear to be doing anything different from what they were doing before it was purchased, and prices skyrocketed as soon as the purchase was made – with US officials trying to stop sales essentially saying, ‘I told you so!’

As for the Midas touch otherwise, they were already leading Starfield, which obviously everyone at Microsoft thought was going to be big but it wasn’t. Call Of Duty is installed on Game Pass and it makes absolutely no difference how successful it is. In fact, it was around this time that Xbox console sales started to decline.

I honestly don’t think some of this is Microsoft’s fault. Almost everything related to Game Pass seems like a good idea in theory, but in practice people just aren’t interested.

So what would happen if Call Of Duty was, say, half as successful as it was? The first thing is that hundreds of people will lose their jobs, because firing talented developers is very easy for Microsoft executives.

But the higher-ups will look at this and realize they will never get that $75 billion back. That’s not a small amount of money and I think if they don’t have another huge success, and next year’s Call Of Duty doesn’t do well either, that’s what will ultimately cause Microsoft to stop producing the Xbox.

I mean, I just want to type that number again: $75 billion. Can you imagine? They paid all that money for one franchise and it ended two years later. Knowing how long it took to make the game is probably not Microsoft’s fault, although maybe they shouldn’t have fired all of Activision’s marketing people. Especially since I haven’t seen much marketing for Black Ops 7 this year.

I don’t know exactly what Microsoft will do if things go pear-shaped. Will they try and sell the entire Xbox at once or will they break all the publishers and developers into more pieces and sell it that way? Who but them has the money and expertise to buy it?

What I do know is that this is a disaster that will impact the entire gaming industry in a way we have never seen in modern times. It’s funny to point and laugh at Microsoft’s rich executives making stupid mistakes, but if things go bad, it will cause a lot of misery and annoyance, for almost everyone but them.

By reader Lossy

Reader features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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