Nintendo have signed, while Valve CEO Gabe Newell says his company won’t bother with a legal agreement, in part because they don’t believe in “requiring any partner to have an agreement that locks them to shipping games on Steam into the distant future”.
Newell gave that quote to Kotaku, where he further layed out their reasoning: It’s worth noting CoD actually only recently returned to Steam, after five years of being stuck on Activision’s own launcher.
Phil Spencer has said that he’d like to see CoD available on as many platforms as possible, which is exactly what you would say when legal folks are trying to shut down your big acquisition deal on the basis that you might not. Offering legally-binding deals is a different matter, with internal sources at the American FTC already suggesting that strategy might be working.
The new deal with Nintendo also means they can publicly do this, now:
Sony’s objections are of course rooted in self-interest, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Ten years doesn’t even strike me as that long when you’re talking about Call of Duty, which I fully expect will be available on my total-immersion VR death bed. Here’s Alice Bee’s piece on why the consolidation of the games industry is bad, actually.
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