UK government says the Nintendo Switch can’t handle Call of Duty

Since their surprise December announcement of a 10-year deal to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles, Microsoft and Activision have expressed confidence that the Switch hardware can handle their popular shooter series. But that confidence didn't convince the UK government, which says that it has "seen no evidence to suggest that [Nintendo] consoles would be technically capable of running a version of CoD that is similar to those in Xbox and PlayStation in terms of quality of gameplay and content."

That blunt assessment is just a minor part of the Competition and Markets Authority's sprawling, 418-page final report on Microsoft's proposed Activision purchase. That report blocked the proposed merger over concerns surrounding the cloud gaming market, but when it comes to judging Microsoft's console competition, the government body clearly considers the Switch in a class by itself.

"Overall, the evidence shows that the product characteristics of Nintendo Switch are significantly different from those of Xbox and PlayStation, including its technical specifications, capability to host graphically intensive games and prices," the CMA writes. "Xbox and PlayStation are more similar in this respect."

The CMA cites a number of unnamed third-party publishers to establish the differences between the Switch and other consoles in terms of both technical capabilities and audience. But the CMA also cites a "Microsoft internal document [that] points to the differences in the technical strategies of Xbox/PlayStation and Nintendo consoles."

While the CMA report acknowledges that the Switch is capable of running "some major games" like Doom Eternal, overall, the regulators say the Switch "does not currently offer the same suite of graphically intensive games that PlayStation and Xbox compete on... [and] may not be capable of offering certain graphically intensive multiplayer games (such as CoD)."

The report does allow that the Switch hardware could easily host a cloud-streamed version of a Call of Duty game, as it has in the past for franchises such as Resident Evil. But such a version would suffer in comparison to locally run versions on other consoles because "there are currently significant differences between cloud gaming and gaming on consoles (e.g., the need for an Internet connection to stream games from cloud gaming services)," the regulator writes.

Anything you can do, I can do slightly worse

The feasibility of a Switch CoD isn't a completely new concern for the CMA. The regulator's February preliminary findings report explicitly noted the "technical limitations" of "the Switch’s limited graphics and storage" and "evidence that large shooter games do not run as well on Nintendo’s consoles due to its technical differentiation."

In Microsoft's February response to those preliminary findings, though, the company insisted that it was "confident" that premium Call of Duty titles "can be optimized to run on the Nintendo Switch in a timely manner using standard techniques which have been used to bring games such as Apex Legends, Doom Eternal, Fortnite, and Crysis 3 to the Switch."

Microsoft noted at the time that Activision's current Warzone engine has been optimized to work with PC GPUs released as far back as 2015, years before the Switch's 2017 launch. More than that, "the Activision development team have a long history of optimizing game performance for available hardware capabilities," Microsoft wrote.

In a Digital Foundry analysis of the viability of a potential Switch Call of Duty, analyst Richard Leadbetter suggested that a scaled-down port's "inevitable drop to 30 fps would be a step too far in compromising the core experience." But that might be less true of a port made for a rumored and anticipated Switch successor, which could be available by the time any significant Call of Duty porting effort would be complete ("You can imagine if [the deal] closed on [some date], starting to do development work to make that happen would likely take a little bit of time," Microsoft's Phil Spencer told The Washington Post in December).

Of course, a primary focus of Microsoft and Activision's decade-long deal with Nintendo was to expand Call of Duty's reach to over 100 million Switch owners, thus blunting any anti-competitive concerns that might be raised by government regulators. Bringing a Call of Duty game to a new Nintendo console with a less established consumer base might have significantly less impact on that score.

(Left unsaid in the CMA report is the fact that Activision has had six years to release a Call of Duty Switch port that could reach the console's massive audience. The fact that it hasn't speaks to the potential difficulty of that porting effort and the potential appeal of a technically limited port for the Switch audience.)

Regardless, it seems the UK government's official position is that any Switch port of Call of Duty would be a practical non-factor in a competitive analysis of the current console gaming market. "We consider that while the Switch may be a substitute to either PlayStation or Xbox for some gamers, overall it is likely to be less so," the regulator writes. "Gamers more often own a Nintendo console and an Xbox or PlayStation than own an Xbox and a PlayStation. This suggests that Nintendo is less substitutable with Xbox or PlayStation than the latter are with each other."