PlayStation-only CoD skin is already showing up on Xbox & PC after Activision merger
ActivisionPlayStation’s exclusive Call of Duty rewards appear to be making their way onto Xbox and PC early now that Microsoft’s Activision merger is a done deal.
After years of legal battles and plenty of red tape, Microsoft now officially owns Activision Blizzard King. The historic $68.7 billion acquisition formally closed on October 13, growing Microsoft’s catalog of IP an exorbitant amount overnight.
One such franchise now owned by the Xbox creators is none other than Call of Duty. Naturally, gamers around the globe have had plenty of questions on the future of the FPS series. Will new entries be coming to Game Pass? Will those on PlayStation be blocked off in the future? And what exactly happens to platform-exclusive content?
Well, plenty of questions still remain answerless, but we do have some clarity on the latter. Xbox head Phil Spencer is adamant that platform-exclusive content will become a thing of the past, though it seems his words are being acted upon much sooner than anyone expected.
YouTube: PlayStationWhen Modern Warfare 2 (2022) went live on October 28 last year, it did so while honoring Activision’s preexisting deal with Sony. Despite the merger being well underway, the publishing giant continued to oblige its earlier agreement in releasing platform-exclusive content on Sony hardware.
For last year’s game, that came in the form of the Oni Operator skin, a bundle exclusive to those on PS4 & PS5 for a limited time. Historically, any PlayStation-exclusives have then made their way to other platforms once a 12-month window is up, though that trend may have just been bucked.
Players across both Xbox & PC are reporting that the Oni skin is already appearing in their games from October 17, nearly a fortnight out from the seemingly agreed-upon date.
None of the parties involved are yet to address this matter at the time of writing. Activision, Microsoft, nor Sony have commented on this early release, so it’s unclear for now whether it was intentional or purely a mistake.
We’ll have to wait and see if the Oni skin is quickly pulled down from Xbox and PC player’s Operator menus until its intended release later this month. But for now, it appears anyone is able to grab the PlayStation-exclusive goodie for themselves, regardless of platform.