The battle to acquire Activision Blizzard has been a long one so far for Microsoft. They continue to battle with regulators to get the fabled green light to ensure the purchase can proceed. However, this back and forth in the court system has shed some new light on different aspects of the industry. Recently, thanks to a tweet from Charlie Intel, a new court document has popped up with Microsoft unveiling just why we’re not seeing Call of Duty games released for the Nintendo Switch. In their eyes, it’s not because the game console lacks the power necessary to make a port or access to cloud gaming.
Instead, it looks like it boils down to Activision not having enough resources to make viable ports for the Nintendo Switch. In the court document, Microsoft points out that we had seen Call of Duty land on the Nintendo Wii and the Wii U console platforms. But there wasn’t much effort in bringing these games over onto the current Nintendo console platform, the Nintendo Switch. Microsoft points out that Activision has finite development resources available, and they specifically chose to deploy these resources for platforms that Activision believes present the greater financial return.
It’s now suggested that we would see these resources become available to support the development cycle when it comes to Call of Duty games on the Nintendo platform. After all, Microsoft has expressed the desire to bring Call of Duty games to as many platforms as possible, including the various line of cloud gaming providers. Of course, most might argue that the lack of resources was not a primary problem for Activision.
Plenty of players likely might point out the struggle of getting a game port to work for the Nintendo Switch because of the lack of power. I would also imagine that there would be plenty of cuts made unless it was released as a title that used the cloud to stream the gameplay experience onto the Nintendo Switch. Regardless, this is just Microsoft’s own view of the matter.
We’re still waiting to see if Microsoft is able to turn around some regulators’ decisions regarding the purchase of Activision Blizzard. Meanwhile, in other news related to Microsoft, it was recently unveiled that the price for the Xbox Series X will rise in select markets. Likewise, you will soon see a rise in the cost of a Game Pass subscription.
