PLAYSTATION has released new data that shows its console players are only interested in one game.
The new information comes from court documents that are being used to block the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft.
Call of Duty is a huge money maker for Sony.
Contained in PlayStation’s documents is a lot of interesting information about what goes on behind the scenes at the company.
One of the biggest shocks is that both Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part 2 cost over $200million (£160million) each to make.
However, there was one more detail that was even more shocking to fans.
As spotted by CharlieIntel, PlayStation reports that over 1million players on PlayStation only played Call of Duty in 2021.
This means that potentially 1million fewer PS5 consoles would have been sold if Microsoft had acquired Activision Blizzard and made CoD an Xbox exclusive.
Not only this but there were only 13million PlayStation players that year, and over two thirds of these spent at least 70% of their time on CoD.
This means that 7million PlayStation players bought a PS5 almost exclusively to play Call of Duty.
Data suggests that through sales of the game alone in the US, PlayStation brought in $800million (£640million) in 2021.
It also made almost double this when you consider CoD sales for PlayStation in the rest of the world.
However, CoD also makes the majority of its profit through the sale of in-game microtransactions.
PlayStation’s Jim Ryan estimates this revenue to amount to around $14billion (£11billion) over two years.
These figures were used to prove to the courts that losing the ability to sell Call of Duty on PlayStation would be a huge blow to the company.
Microsoft has claimed that even if it purchased the Call of Duty publisher, it would still allow the series to be sold on competing platforms.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
