Activision believes that bringing Call of Duty games like Warzone and Modern Warfare 2 to the Nintendo Switch wouldn’t be difficult, according to Microsoft in a newly released statement to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. This follows a rumor in January 2023 that a new Activision studio could already be working on a Call of Duty port for the Nintendo console.
Activision can use existing optimization techniques for Call of Duty Switch games
Many have been wondering how Microsoft and Activision would port graphically intensive Call of Duty games to the Switch. This is after Xbox boss Phil Spencer announced in December 2022 in a tweet that it had “entered into a 10-year commitment to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo following the merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.”
But Microsoft says that this would not be a problem for Activision in a recent response to the UK regulator:
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 on the Nintendo Switch in a timely manner…
Activision notes that it could use similar techniques employed by other games like Apex Legends, Doom Eternal, Fortnite, and Crysis 3 to make Call of Duty Switch ports. Another reason for its “confidence” is because games like Warzone can run on PCs that have “GPU cards that were released as far back as 2015.”
The developer also already has an estimate of how long the process would take, though the exact number of months has been redacted in the document. Still, this suggests that Microsoft and Activision have already started the process of releasing Call of Duty games on Switch.
