Gabe Newell, the president of Valve, has responded to an offer from Microsoft to keep Call of Duty on Steam in future. We need to thank Kotaku for the original story, who reported that Valve were offered and even sent a draft agreement for a “long-term Call of Duty commitment,” a proposal the company kindly turned down.
In a statement, Newell laid out their reasoning for declining the offer. In his first point, Newell said Valve were “not believers in requiring any partner to have an agreement that locks them to shipping games on Steam into the distant future.” Newell said Phil Spencer head of Xbox, and his creative team at Microsoft, had “always followed through on what they told us they would do so we trust their intentions,” and felt that Microsoft had “all the motivation they need to be on the platforms and devices where Call of Duty customers want to be.”
“We’re happy that Microsoft wants to continue using Steam to reach customers with Call of Duty when their Activision acquisition closes,” Newell said, focusing their work on “building valuable features for not only Microsoft but all Steam customers and partners.” With this statement, it appears Steam wants to deliver gamers the games they enjoy without locking creators into contracts to deliver them.
Since 2017, Call of Duty titles became absent from Steam following the release of Call of Duty: WWII. Every subsequent title was only available on PC through Activision Blizzard-owned Battle.net. Five years later, the shooter franchise returned to the platform in October with the smash hit release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, which became the third most-played game on Steam after launch.
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