Sony gets 70% from the CoD PS revenue and 100% from 1st party games.
Meaning that Sony's shooters combined only need to generate 71% of what CoD did in PS to generate more money to Sony than CoD.
Sony can invest the budget that they spent in the past for CoD marketing + minor exclusives in their upcoming 1st party shooters.
It will hurt even more if COD stays relevant. What do you think is going to happen when the PS6 launches but Microsoft announces their next Generation Call of Duty is exclusive to Xbox ecosystem?
First we have to see if MS ends acquiring ABK. Second we have to see if MS ends making CoD console exclusive rejecting all CoD PS revenue + most CoD revenue from XB and PC game sales. And if they ever do it, we'll have to see when they do it. We also have the consider the option of keeping CoD 10 years in PS and kill the Xbox console hardware before that period ends.
In any case, Sony should stop supporting CoD even if MS doesn't end buying it because even in that case they may do deals with MS. ABK isn't a reliable partner for Sony anymore.
All efforts and budget Sony did in the past to market and support CoD and other shooters should be redirected to support the 1st party Sony shooters to don't depend on CoD, Battlefield, Rainbow 6, XDefiant, Apex Legend, etc. to have well covered that niche.
Also true! But I still think Sony should ride it out short term until they at least have another revenue stream to rely on, somewhat. It also wouldn't go overwell with the 8 million monthly players of COD on PS.
SIE generates 23-25B per year, and only -supposedly 1.5B, the image of the court document wasn't clear- comes from CoD. We also have to remember that 8M MAU is a very small portion of the around 110M PS MAU, and that part of these CoD MAU are from Warzone, a F2P (remember, most players in F2P don't pay anything).
There's a good percent of PS users who also have XB or PC gaming, so pretty likely they wouldn't leave PS. Also, there are other ones who may only have PS but if they don't have CoD will play something else specially if they got CoD thanks to Sony's CoD marketing that now will be used instead with other games.
So the impact of losing CoD would affect a tiny percent of PS revenue and userbase. We also have to remember that the revenue and userbase of PS is in a growing trend, so that growth would compensate the loss.
Why are we pretending MS has no say in this?
If MS ends acquiring ABK, MS will be the only one who will decide what happens with CoD once the Sony+ABK deal ends next year.
CoD makes a lot of money in PS, ABK gets 70% from it and Sony 30% (but being CoD they may have a better deal). CoD are also so expensive to make and they release at least one per year. So both Sony and MS would be interested to keep CoD in PS.
But specially MS, because they would lose way more revenue than Sony if they remove it from PS and making it exclusive wouldn't almost hurt Sony's revenue and userbase and wouldn't help them steal a lot of users from PS.