Microsoft commented further on its plans for Call of Duty for Switch and stated its confidence in the franchise running natively on the console.
In case you missed the news, Microsoft was hoping to complete its deal to acquire Activision Blizzard, announced months ago. However, things did not go smoothly due to concerns over the meaning of the merger. Microsoft is continually trying to prove its case and recently sought to increase confidence in cross-platform support by finalizing a deal to have Call of Duty games on Nintendo systems for the next ten years: it just ended.
The Competition and Markets Authority, which is the competition regulator in the United Kingdom, has published its recommendations and Microsoft released a respond. This includes a discussion of Call of Duty on Switch. Rather than going the cloud route, Microsoft thinks it can bring Call of Duty to Switch, not just Warzone, but the full-priced experiences as well. The companies named other games like Apex Legends, Doom Eternal, Fortnite, and Crysis 3 as successful ports.
CoD includes both the free-to-play Warzone title and paid versions. The game engine that powers Warzone is mature and has been optimized to run on a wide range of hardware devices (from the Xbox One console released in 2015 to the Xbox Series X). Warzone supports PC hardware with GPU cards released in 2015 (i.e. before the Nintendo Switch was released in 2017).
Activision’s development team has a long history of optimizing gaming performance for available hardware capabilities. The parties are confident that in addition to Warzone, CoD buy-to-play titles (e.g., CoD: Modern Warfare 2) can be optimized to run on Nintendo Switch in a timely manner using standard techniques that have been used to bringing games like Apex Legends, DOOM Eternal, Fortnite, and Crysis 3 to Switch. Activision estimates this could be done within approximately (unspecified) months.
Microsoft’s response came in response to concerns raised by the CMA. As stated in his report:
Internal Activision documents point to the technical limitations of the Nintendo Switch console. For example, a document from Activision specifies in an initial review that to produce a CoD title on Nintendo Switch, the CoD game would need (unspecified) (while most current CoD titles require 125-175 GB of console storage or pc). ). The document also references Apex Legends (unspecified). Another Activision document reviewing potential (unspecified) CoD studies assesses the additional work required and points to technical issues in other games.
We’ve also seen evidence that big shooters don’t work as well on Nintendo consoles due to their technical differentiation. A third claimed that graphics-intensive shooters can often be initially targeted for PlayStation and Xbox due to their console’s performance specifics, and migrating to Nintendo Switch may require financial investment and compromises in graphics quality, or cloud usage. . game walkthrough
Editors’ comments also indicated that developing a game for Switch is a very different task than for Xbox and PS due to their technical differences. A publisher said they encountered technical difficulties porting a game to Nintendo Switch, but had no difficulty porting the same game to Xbox or PlayStation. The publisher noted that the Switch’s limited graphics and storage are technical limitations that affect the performance of competitive games more than those of games brought to Xbox or PlayStation. Another publisher claimed that several of their games are not
available on Nintendo, as Nintendo has different capabilities than PlayStation and Xbox.However, we believe the above evidence shows that, compared to Xbox and PlayStation, the Nintendo Switch(i) currently does not offer the same set of graphics-intensive games as the PlayStation and Xbox in competition (with the exception of a few games like Fortnite and Apex Legends), (ii) may not be able to offer certain graphics
multiplayer-intensive games (such as CoD), and (iii) do not provide a similar user experience (for example, in terms of storage, graphics, and frame rate).
Cloud gaming was acknowledged in the report, but “Switch’s ability to connect to a third-party cloud gaming service provider would not make it a closer competitor to Xbox and PlayStation in the gaming market. console.” “. It concludes that “evidence shows that the product characteristics of Nintendo Switch are significantly different from those of Xbox and PlayStation, including its technical specifications, ability to host graphics-intensive games, and pricing.”