Re: A ten year agreement
Good point about whether CoD will still be a thing in 10 years.
Remember the lawsuit by Virgin Media TV vs Sky over access to Sky's then flagship Sky One channel and all the popular programmes it showed? The court gave Virgin access to the Sky One channel on their own platform, so Sky just created a new channel called Sky Atlantic which Virgin didn't have access to and put all their good new programmes on that channel instead. Last I heard (some time ago), Sky One was still showing the same old repeats they were showing at the time of the court case! And while Virgin customers can now view it, the channel ceased to be an attraction the moment the judge's gavel banged. Virgin's mistake was asking for specifics, if it had asked for access to all of Sky's channels on an on-going basis instead of naming Sky One then Sky couldn't have weasled out of the judgement.
Same risk with Microsoft pulling the same trick, which I presume is why they are offering access to specific titles which can then be reworked and renamed to make sure nobody but themselves gets access to all of Activision/Blizzard's latest games, and with no agreement to publish any of them anywhere except Windows and XBox.
With no future updates, it wouldn't take long before CoD (or any other named title) was obsolete and worthless to competing platforms.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
