There’s been plenty going on in the world of video games that have made fans scratch their heads. But the biggest “feud” right now isn’t even the console wars but the politics between Microsoft and Sony. Long story short, Sony has accused Microsoft of trying to “corner the market” with their potential acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Microsoft will allegedly restrict who can get IPs like Call of Duty and thus make themselves the sole beneficiary of their sales. The team at Xbox denied this vehemently and even went so far as to make a 10-year deal with Nintendo ensuring that the system got the property with the promise that it’ll be on par with the other versions.
But, being honest here, many fans weren’t sure they believed Microsoft/Xbox on that one. At first, they said that the ports to the Switch and other Nintendo systems would be “what you would expect” for the console. But, unfortunately, that’s not exactly reassuring. Switch owners have had some incredible ports over the years, including several in 2022. Still, they’ve also been the subject of lackluster ones and ones that are so bad that developers had to apologize and promise to fix them.
With everyone going on with the acquisitions deal, Microsoft posted a reply to some recent “findings” by investigators. It noted how the Nintendo deal would be above board because the teams involved know how to make optimized titles:
“The Activision development team have a long history of optimizing game 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 the Nintendo Switch in a timely manner using standard techniques which have been used to bring games such as Apex Legends, DOOM Eternal, Fortnite and Crysis 3 to the Switch. Activision estimates that this could be done with a period of around (unspecified) months.”
On the one hand, they are right that those games were brought to the Switch, and many of them run perfectly fine. But, on the other hand, that doesn’t guarantee that Call of Duty will run well on Switch when they attempt to bring it over.
Moreover, while Activision has a “long history” of performance, it’s not necessarily a good history. They have been in trouble many times for the games they’ve released, and that doesn’t even touch on the worker issues they’ve had.
As such, this is a “wait and see” situation where we must see where things go next.
