Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has confirmed that Microsoft has entered a 10-year commitment to bring the Call of Duty series to Nintendo Switch for the first time.
“Microsoft has entered into a 10-year commitment to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo following the merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard King. Microsoft is committed to helping bring more games to more people – however they choose to play,” Spencer announced on Twitter.
He expanded on this in an interview with The Washington Post, referring to the projected June 2023 window in which the deal will close if regulators don’t choose to block it:
“You can imagine if [the deal] closed on that date, starting to do development work to make that happen would likely take a little bit of time. Once we get into the rhythm of this, our plan would be that when [a Call of Duty game] launches on PlayStation, Xbox and PC, that it would also be available on Nintendo at the same time.”
He added that Activision Blizzard has been made aware of the new agreement, is in a planning phase and “would do specific work to make the game run well on Nintendo Switch and their silicon and support their platform completely.
“Minecraft and Call of Duty are different games. But from how you get games onto Nintendo, how you run a development team that is targeting multiple platforms, that’s experience we have.”
The agreement has specified a 10-year length, as the long-term commitment will be encouraging to the Call of Duty community and it is likely that the companies will continue to work together beyond the arrangement.
“It’s just about picking an expiration date, not with the goal of ever expiring, but just like, the legalese of a document has to say this goes through some date,” Spencer explained. “But once we start working with a platform, just like we have with with ‘Minecraft,’ both on PlayStation and on Nintendo’s platform, our goal would be to continue to support those customers.”
