Microsoft announces 10-year legal agreement with Nintendo

Microsoft has announced that it has signed a 10-year contract to bring its titles to Nintendo platforms, including Activision’s Call of Duty (COD).

The details:

• Brad Smith, Microsoft's Vice Chairman and President, announced on Twitter that the company has signed a "binding 10-year contract" to bring Xbox titles to the Nintendo Switch and future Nintendo platforms. According to the statement, this is part of the company's goal of providing "more choice to more players and more competition to the gaming market.”
• Head of Xbox Phil Spencer announced the company's plan to bring the COD franchise to the Switch in December 2022. This claim surprised many people since the gaming behemoth is currently embroiled in an anti-trust lawsuit over its ongoing attempt to acquire the franchise's owner, Activision-Blizzard.
• According to the message, future COD titles will be released on Nintendo platforms on the same day as the Xbox, with all features and content intact. There's no word on when these releases will begin, but we could see a Switch version of the previously reported 2023 COD.
• One concern is that the Nintendo Switch is nearly seven years old and lacks the power of the last generation Xbox One and PlayStation 4, making complete ports of modern COD games to the platform difficult. Spencer previously stated that even Minecraft's Switch port required "specific work" to run smoothly, so the developer is likely to do some extensive optimization or possibly use the cloud in some way.

Other recent COD news:

• It has been reported that the 2023 COD release will now be a complete game, as opposed to the "premium DLC" that was rumored to take its place. The title will be developed by Sledgehammer Games with the assistance of other studios such as Treyarch, Raven Software, and Infinity Ward.
• Activision reportedly suffered from an undisclosed security breach in December 2022, resulting in the alleged theft of sensitive company documents and the release schedule for upcoming Modern Warfare II (MWII) content. The schedule also mentions a project codenamed "Jupiter," which is believed to be the upcoming COD release for 2023. Activision has since denied that any sensitive data was compromised.