Since their surprise December announcement of a 10-year deal to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles, Microsoft and Activision have expressed confidence that the Switch hardware can handle their popular shooter series. But that confidence did not convince the British government, which says it has “seen no evidence to suggest so [Nintendo] consoles would be technically capable of running a version of CoD comparable in quality of gameplay and content to those on Xbox and PlayStation. report on Microsoft’s proposed purchase of Activision. That report blocked the proposed merger over concerns about the cloud gaming market, but when it comes to assessing Microsoft’s console competition, the government agency clearly sees the Switch as in a league of its own.
“Overall, the evidence shows that Nintendo Switch’s product features differ significantly from Xbox and PlayStation, including its technical specifications, ability to host graphically intensive games, and pricing,” the CMA writes. “Xbox and PlayStation are more similar in this regard.”
The CMA is citing a number of unnamed third-party publishers to determine the differences between the Switch and other consoles, both in terms of technical capabilities and audience. But the CMA also cites an “Microsoft Internal Document [that] points out the differences in the technical strategies of Xbox/PlayStation and Nintendo consoles.”
While the CMA report acknowledges that the Switch is capable of “playing some big games” like Eternal fateOverall, the regulators say the Switch “doesn’t currently offer the same range of graphically intensive games that PlayStation and Xbox compete with… [and] may not be able to offer certain graphically intensive multiplayer games (such as CoD).”
The report does admit that the Switch hardware can easily host a cloud-streamed version of a Call of Duty game, as it has done in the past for franchises like Resident Evil. But such a version would suffer compared to locally run versions on other consoles because “there are currently significant differences between cloud gaming and console gaming (for example, the need for an internet connection to stream games from cloud gaming services),” the regulator said. writes.
Anything you can do, I can do something worse
The feasibility of a Switch CoD is not an entirely new concern for the CMA. The regulator’s February preliminary findings report explicitly pointed out the “technical limitations” of “the Switch’s limited graphics and storage” and “evidence that big shooter games don’t work as well on Nintendo’s consoles because of the technical differentiation.”
However, in Microsoft’s February response to those preliminary findings, the company emphasized that it was “confident” that premium Call of Duty titles “can be optimized to run on Nintendo Switch in a timely manner using standard techniques used to bring games like Apex Legends, Eternal fate, FortniteAnd crysis 3 to the switch.”
Nintendo/Bethesda
Microsoft noted at the time that Activision is current War zone engine is optimized to work with PC GPUs released as far back as 2015, years before the Switch’s launch in 2017. In fact, “Activision’s development team has a long history of optimizing game performance for available hardware capabilities,” wrote Microsoft.
In a Digital Foundry analysis of the viability of a potential Switch Call of Duty, analyst Richard Leadbetter suggested that the “inevitable drop to 30fps from a downsized port would be a step too far to compromise the core experience.” But that might be less true for a port made for a rumored and anticipated successor to the Switch, which could be available by the time a significant porting attempt of Call of Duty is completed (“Imagine if [the deal] closed on [some date]starting development work to make that possible would probably take some time,” Microsoft’s Phil Spencer told The Washington Post in December).
Of course, a primary focus of Microsoft and Activision’s decade-long deal with Nintendo was to expand Call of Duty’s reach to more than 100 million Switch owners, thus addressing any anti-competitive concerns that might be raised by government regulators. taken away. Bringing a Call of Duty game to a new Nintendo console with a less established customer base can have significantly less impact on that score.
(Unmentioned in the CMA report is the fact that Activision has had six years to release a Call of Duty Switch port that could reach the console’s huge audience. The fact that it hasn’t talked about the potential difficulty of that porting and the potential appeal of a tech-restricted port to the Switch audience.)
Anyway, it seems the UK government’s official stance is that any Switch port of Call of Duty would be a practical non-factor in a competitive analysis of the current console gaming market. “We believe that while the Switch may be a substitute for PlayStation or Xbox for some gamers, overall it is less likely to be the case,” the regulator writes. “Gamers are more likely to have a Nintendo console and an Xbox or PlayStation than an Xbox and a PlayStation. This suggests that Nintendo is less interchangeable with Xbox or PlayStation than the latter are with each other.”
