Why Call of Duty matters

What Call of Duty says about the future of gaming

The latest Call of Duty title is out tomorrow. But the future of the top-grossing and influential gaming series remains clouded, Nick Statt wrote Protocol.

Call of Duty is facing a huge upheaval. Microsoft’s pending acquisition of the franchise’s parent company Activision Blizzard, accompanied by a possible bitter breakup from longtime partner Sony and a gaming industry that has generally moved away from consoles, make the game for radical changes.

• Activision Blizzard has rejected industry trends like live service gaming and free-to-play business models until recently, relying on hardcore fans to buy annual releases, a model that worked until last year. , when Call of Duty: Vanguard crashed.

Activision already plans to skip its fall release of Call of Duty next year for the first time since 2005. Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to begin offering Call of Duty on its Game Pass service.

• The all-you-can-play monthly subscription model is very different from how Activision has sold Call of Duty historically. Game Pass also offers a cloud gaming component, which can let users play Call of Duty without the need for a console. Taken together, these could deal a major blow to the console market.

Who will be in charge of Call of Duty next? probably need to start thinking outside the box. “Maybe the transition to different ownership allows for some breathing room to make exactly those kinds of changes,” Joost van Dreunen, an assistant professor at NYU, told Nick.

• Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer may be just the change the game needs. At the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference on Wednesday, he said “Call of Duty is particularly available on PlayStation. I’d like to see it on Switch, I’d like to see the game playable on many different screens. The our goal is to treat CoD like Minecraft.”

The catch? Activision Blizzard’s relationship with Sony. The console company for years enjoyed an exclusive financial relationship with Call of Duty that helped keep the PlayStation platform dominant. Now, Sony is appealing to UK regulators to end the merger.

But with the way the game industry is changing, older models may not be useful to Sony much longer.

Read more: Call of Duty said goodbye to the traditional console gaming model

Selling for the cloud

Enterprise software is notoriously difficult to buy. But like cloud marketplaces Salesforce, Microsoftand Amazon is trying to change that, Aisha Counts writes the Protocol.

Cloud marketplaces are nothing new. But as more software is put on the market, the need for digital sales channels that facilitate the software buying process has grown.

• “At the end of the day, nobody wants to build software to sell software, and that’s why we exist,” John Jahnke, CEO of cloud marketplace platform Tackle.io, told Protocol’s Aisha Counts.
• Tackle acts as an intermediary between businesses and the cloud marketplaces, handling the entire go-to-market process.

Pandemics are a big part of evolution of cloud marketplaces. Since sellers can no longer meet their buyers, they need to know how to communicate with them more effectively. “With everything moving to the cloud, cloud marketplaces have accelerated in popularity as part of the solution,” he said.

What’s great about buying from a marketplace rather than directly from a software vendor? It’s really beneficial for both the buyer and the seller, Jahnke said.

• Having everything in one place helps a buyer consolidate budget and vendors, so they don’t have to “maintain contracts with 1,000 different suppliers,” he says.
• For independent software vendors, access to cloud budgets and the ability to co-sell with cloud providers offer significant value.

But listing on a cloud marketplace is only the first step. In reality, successfully selling an enterprise product requires targeting the right clients, positioning it appropriately, and thinking about pricing and packaging, Jahnke says, which is where Tackle comes in. . “There are a lot of nuances there — to get them to launch, sell, and then sell again and again over time,” he told Aisha. “The list is the starting line, not the finish line.”

Read more: How cloud marketplaces became the most important software sales channel

A MESSAGE FROM CAPITAL ONE SOFTWARE

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People are talking

Phil Spencer, of Microsoft CEO of gaminglikened the metaverse to a “poorly developed video game”:

• “Video game creators have an amazing ability to build compelling worlds where we want to spend time. For me, making the metaverse feel like a meeting room… I just find that’s not where I want to spend most of my time. .”

Disney CEO Bob Chapek said he wanted to create “more customized” personal fan experience by collecting Disney+ viewing data:

• “We can give you a better park experience, because we know what your preferences are in terms of viewing and a better Disney+ experience because we know what your affinities are.”

Making moves

TikTok expands this footprint in London. The company is reportedly negotiating a lease for an 11-story, 134,000-square-foot space.

CEO of ServiceNow Bill McDermott is replacing founder Fred Luddy as chairman of the board of directors. Luddy will remain on the board.

Chris McLaughlin is Hyland’s new chief revenue officer, an enterprise content services provider. McLaughlin joins the company from LumApps, where he was chief marketing officer.

It’s Jay Y. Lee now it’s official The executive chairman of Samsung. He has been the de facto leader for almost a decade.

Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle startup, is closing. Its parts are absorbed by its main backers, Ford and VW.

Seagate is cutting 3,000 jobs as major buyers cut orders for its hard drives.

In other news

Elon Musk showed up at Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, to tweet “Entering Twitter HQ — leave it at that!” Sigh. Above all: the banks started sending cash to fund the deal, and trading of Twitter shares on the NYSE became suspended Friday. Yes, it happens. And apparently without the 75% staff reduction, according to Bloomberg.

Meta lost $65 billion in the market cap as investors worry about the company’s spending on metaverse technology as its revenues continue to decline.

Tesla faced a criminal investigation in the US with its autopilot technology. The investigation involves the company’s claims that its cars can drive themselves.

A lawsuit against TikTok accusing it of causing death of a 10-year-old girl by promoting a deadly “blackout challenge” was struck down by a United States District Judge in Philadelphia.

Volkswagen will only electric cars in Europe within the next ten years.

Federal authority monitors social media posts following the overturning of Roe v. Wade to gather intelligence on the protests.

Turkish authorities fined Meta $18.6 million for violating its competition law. Regulators say the company has a dominant position in social networking and video advertising services and is blocking competitors.

Mobileye stock had a good first day, increasing by almost 40% to close at $28.97. The Intel-controlled company sold about $860 million worth of stock in the IPO.

Meta confirmed this Quest 2 virtual reality headphones, a consumer-grade device, will arrive next year.

Tech unicorns are rare again

The title of billion-dollar tech unicorn, once common among buzzy Silicon Valley startups, is becoming rarer. Amid layoffs, restructuring, and investors tightening their wallets, only 25 companies reached the status of being worth more than $1 billion in the third quarter of 2022, one-fifth of the number from the same period last year. But investors see a silver lining: “It’s going to get a ton of founders who shouldn’t be doing it outside the ecosystem — people are doing it for money and fame,” said one. The Washington Post.

A MESSAGE FROM CAPITAL ONE SOFTWARE

The flexibility of the cloud helps companies like Capital One unlock access to their data with performance that can be instantly scaled. But this flexibility and scale can also create a unique challenge for organizations and users unaccustomed to cloud optimization.

Learn more