Microsoft responds to criticism about how Call of Duty will work on Nintendo Switch

In documents submitted to the UK's Office of Markets and Competition, Microsoft explained how it believes it will be able to launch Call of Duty games on Nintendo Switch.

Here's What We Know

Last month, Microsoft and Nintendo signed a 10-year agreement to release Call of Duty games on the Japanese company's portable consoles on the same day as the games will be released on Xbox, if Activision's acquisition of Blizzard is successful. A little later, the CMA (and players) expressed suspicions about how CoD would work on the Nintendo Switch's weak hardware, to which Microsoft made the following arguments:

• Warzone's engine has been "optimised to run on a wide range of hardware devices," including Xbox One since 2015 and PC GPUs "released as early as 2015" that predate the Switch's launch in 2017. (In a note, Microsoft notes that Activision offers a mobile version of Warzone that "runs on mobile phones that have much lower performance specifications than the Nintendo Switch.")
• Microsoft also says that Activision has a "long history of optimising game performance for available hardware," and it is "confident" that the techniques that have made graphics-intensive games like Apex Legends, Doom Eternal, and Fortnite work on Switch can be used for Call of Duty.

If you've ever played Fortnite on Switch, you know that the game looks much worse there than on desktop platforms, but it's still very playable. Perhaps the situation with Call of Duty will be the same: you'll have worse graphics, but at least you'll be able to play it on the Switch handheld.

Source: The Verge