Microsoft promised Call of Duty on Switch for 10 years if the Activision Blizzard deal goes through, but the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) isn’t convinced. Microsoft originally made the promise after concerns over the deal’s impact on competition in the games space arose, and company president Brad Smith said, during a recent meeting with European Union representatives in Brussels, that Nintendo agreed to the deal.
GamesRadar recently looked back through the CMA’s initial report from February on the deal and found the CMA already expressed doubt that such a deal would matter. Late in the report, the CMA said technical disparities between Nintendo hardware and other game consoles make it unlikely that the Switch could run Call of Duty games adequately. Even if it could, it would require additional, costly work to get the games running.
“We have… seen evidence that large shooter games do not run as well on Nintendo’s consoles due to its technical differentiation,” the CMA said in its report. “One third party [publisher] submitted that graphically intensive shooters may often be targeted originally at PlayStation and Xbox due to the specific characteristics of their console performance and that porting to the Nintendo Switch may require financial investment and compromises on graphical quality”.
There are possible alternatives that might satisfy everyone involved, though. Nintendo may be releasing a new, more powerful console in the near future, and Microsoft may be aware of the company’s plans. The company may also release cloud versions of the games instead, as Capcom did with Resident Evil Village and IO Interactive with Hitman 3.
The CMA will issue its full report on April 26. The European anti-competition agency is expected to issue its objections to the deal soon as well, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit against Microsoft, intended to block the deal, remains ongoing.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
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