Microsoft Still Working To Bring Call Of Duty To Nintendo Fans

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 is the next entry in Activision’s long-running military shooter franchise and it’s once again coming to last-gen consoles. But what about the Switch 2? More than two-years after Microsoft and Nintendo entered into an agreement to bring Call of Duty to Switch, nothing has materialized. Sources close to the matter tell Kotaku that both sides are still working on it.

“Microsoft and Nintendo have now negotiated and signed a binding 10-year legal agreement to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo players—the same day as Xbox, with full features and content parity—so they can experience Call of Duty just as Xbox and PlayStation games enjoy Call of Duty,” Microsoft president Brad Smith announced back in February 2023. “We are committed to providing long term equal access to Call of Duty to other gaming platforms, bringing more choice to more players and more competition to the gaming market.”

That deal, the details of which have never been made public, was inked back when Microsoft was trying to consolidate regulatory approval for its roughly $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. To assuage concerns that it might take one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world and make it exclusive to Xbox, Microsoft made agreements with other companies, including eventually Sony, promising that for at least the first 10 years after the acquisition went through, it would continue bringing Call of Duty to other platforms, including ones it hadn’t been on in years like the Switch.

So where is it? The list of platforms for Black Ops 7 revealed today does not include Nintendo’s older hardware or the recently launched Switch 2, even though the latter has performance capability on par with the PlayStation 4, which is getting the game this fall. While sources tell Kotaku that both Microsoft and Nintendo are still committed to getting the franchise on the latter’s hardware, it’s unclear what the hold-up is or what the final result will be.

Call of Duty hasn’t appeared on a Nintendo platform since 2013’s Ghosts came to the Wii U. While the ports of the multiplayer shooter never ran particularly great on the Mario maker’s underpowered consoles, it at least provided an option for fans to access the annual blockbuster. One obvious avenue for getting Call of Duty on weaker hardware is using cloud gaming. Black Ops 6 is currently available to stream with Game Pass Ultimate but cloud gaming hasn’t been used to bring last year’s entry to Switch.

Black Ops 7 isn’t the only Microsoft first-party game that’s currently a no-show on Switch 2. Despite the increased horsepower of the handheld hybrid, games like Sea of Thieves and Grounded, which were previously ported to PS5, remain MIA. That might be because Microsoft doesn’t currently have plans to bring either of them over, or it could simply be that Nintendo wants to announce those plans on its own time. For now, the Switch 2 remains conspicuously absent from Microsoft’s recent multiplatform shift.

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