Microsoft has struck a 10-year deal to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms — assuming the Xbox Activision deal goes through, of course — and says those games will work as intended.
When asked how games like Call of Duty would work on Switch or Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service, Microsoft president Brad Smith said he was “not the right person to dive into the architecture of each platform”. But Smith says “we’ll make sure our games work exactly the way people expect them to,” at a high technical level.
I’m not sure Microsoft should use words like “wait” here, because I don’t think anyone wait a particularly good Call of Duty experience on a platform like the current Switch. Microsoft said today that CoD will be coming to Nintendo platforms the same day as Xbox “with full functionality and content parity.” Given how many games less technically demanding than CoD have arrived on Switch in horribly compromised states, it’s hard to imagine having a good experience with, say, Warzone 2 on the hybrid handheld.
Microsoft’s public disclosure of the deal specifically states that Call of Duty will come to “Nintendo gamers” without mentioning specific consoles. It’s entirely possible that by the time the Activision Blizzard deal ends, Nintendo Switch Pro, or whatever Nintendo’s next console is, is about to launch, and that may give everyone a step easy towards the hardware power problem. . If not, you might want to prepare for another Switch cloud release.
Today we argue that Call of Duty on Nintendo Switch leaves only players disappointed, and while Microsoft would like to suggest that we will achieve parity on all platforms, it’s hard to imagine how this is possible.
Microsoft says so “doesn’t see a viable way to sell Call of Duty” to no one else