It is obviously still too early to say in what year the first Call of Duty of this new contractual agreement will be available on a Nintendo machine, a machine which will undoubtedly not be the Switch but its future replacement. For the time being, this is of little importance, the urgency for Microsoft being to highlight its desire to share the Call of Duty franchise with as many platforms and players as possible. One way of allaying the fears of the competition authority, in particular the Competition and Markets Authority of the United Kingdom, the European Commission or the Federal Trade Commission from the United States, which for the time being does not see favorably the miraculous project of acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft.
Microsoft and Nintendo have now negotiated and signed a ten-year legal agreement to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo gamers – same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity – so they can experience Call of Duty like Xbox and PlayStation gamers. We are committed to providing equal access to Call of Duty to other gaming platforms for the long term, bringing more choice to more players and more competition in the gaming market. It is part of our commitment to offer Xbox games and Activision titles like Call of Duty to more players on more platforms.
And finally, why stop at Call of Duty? It’s good that this implies the message posted by Brad Smith on Twitter, in which the Microsoft executive claims that this agreement is part of a larger package aimed at releasing Xbox games on Nintendo consoles. Of course, the two neighbors of Redmond have already had to work together, especially when it came to taking charge of the crossplay on the different versions of Minecraft (a train that PlayStation took a little later), then to invite the characters of Banjo and Kazooie in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate or even more recently to allow the Nintendo 64 classic, GoldenEye 007, to finally come out on modern platforms.
By showing flexibility, Microsoft seeks to score points to obtain the green light of its great project of acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a operation at 69 billion dollars without any equivalent in the video game industry and in that of the entertainment in general. Incidentally, releasing homemade games on Nintendo consoles would probably not hurt business, at a time when Microsoft’s latest results show a drop in sales of Xbox consoles and games, far from the growth posted by Sony with its playstation5.
It should be added that the timing of this communication is not fortuitous given that Microsoft is going to the European Commission today to convince it to authorize the continuation of its takeover bid for Activision Blizzard.
We’ve now signed a binding 10-year contract to bring Xbox games to Nintendo’s gamers. This is just part of our commitment to bring Xbox games and Activision titles like Call of Duty to more players on more platforms. pic.twitter.com/JmO0hzw1BO
—Brad Smith (@BradSmi) February 21, 2023
