Literally go fuck yourself Microsoft.

Microsoft explains that Call of Duty doesn’t have to be on every console, because it isn’t that important to the video game industry.

I feel like they should not be the ones making that judgement when deciding if some company is going to be buying up large portions of an industry.

aren't they just admitting that they do vertical bundling ? assuming its fairly cheap to allow cod on steamdeck.

so the issue should be "how much does or would that bundling harm call of duty consumers (including marginal non-buyers)" by reducing their choices.

Steam deck isn't entering the market of "hardware that cod players can use" so not relevant to that segment of the hardware market.

what is relevant is the market for FPS software (and play servers?), whether a steamdeck user can buy a reasonable substitute ; how good of a substitute it is determines the level or harm.
so if most players are near-indifferent to switching to a steamdeck FPS, then the bundling is not very harmful.

that's why bundling , say, photoshop with windows would be worse - as lots of ps customers will have a high cost of switching -because they don't want to be called gimps.

No but it would be nice to have.