We now know when PlayStation‘s marketing deal with Call of Duty will end. Marketing deals are a pretty important thing for platforms. Xbox and PlayStation invest a lot of money in its first-party games like Halo and The Last of Us, but they can only release so many big, high-quality first-party games every year. That’s why it’s important for these platforms to go out and make deals with third-party publishers like Activision to secure lucrative marketing deals that allow them to communicate to fans of franchises like Call of Duty why they should play the series on their platform. Given Call of Duty is one of the biggest franchises in gaming, this has been something the two big platforms have fought over for years. Xbox had it for quite some time, allowing them to sort of cultivate a “dude bro shooters” branding for the console which helped curate a very specific audience.
However, things changed with Call of …