It sounds like the CMA know what they’re talking about (pic: Activision)
If you thought Microsoft’s idea of bringing Call Of Duty to Switch was both impractical and pointless, you’re not the only one.
Now that the bombshell has been dropped and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has made it clear they don’t want Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, it’s time to pour over all the details of their 415-page report.
Microsoft (and Sony, when it suits them) have tried to claim that the CMA don’t understand the games industry but most of what they’ve said so far is perfectly reasonable, including their comments about bringing Call Of Duty to Switch.
‘Nintendo does not current offer CoD, and we have seen no evidence to suggest that its consoles would be technically capable of running a version of CoD that is similar to those in Xbox and PlayStation in terms of quality of gameplay and content,’ says their report.
The CMA is savvy enough to realise that not only would Call Of Duty not run on a Switch but that most owners probably wouldn’t be that interested in playing it anyway.
‘We found that Nintendo’s consoles compete less closely with either of Xbox or PlayStation, generally offering consoles with different technical specifications, and with its most popular titles tending to be more family- and child-friendly,’ says the report.
For reasons best known to itself Microsoft has made a lot of fuss about the idea of bringing Call Of Duty to the Switch, as if only it has the ability to do so – despite the fact that the franchise has appeared on many older Nintendo consoles, and been roundly ignored, just as you’d expect.
A cloud version of the game could conceivably work on Switch, although it’s hard to imagine most people would have the bandwidth to play the online multiplayer, but Microsoft has never mentioned that as an option.
Its claim about bringing Call Of Duty to 150 million more players is almost entirely based on selling it to Switch owners, with the figure simply being the number of Switch owners in the world added to the number of GeForce Now owners.
As the CMA seems to be well aware, the number of people whose only gaming device is a Switch and yet are somehow desperate to play Call Of Duty is vanishingly small, and the entire argument is pure nonsense.
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If you thought Microsoft’s idea of bringing Call Of Duty to Switch was both impractical and pointless, you’re not the only one.