Microsoft dropped a big announcement on us earlier today in relation to Nintendo, confirming that a 10-year commitment would see Call of Duty coming to that platform - as long as the company is successful in acquiring Activision Blizzard.
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has revealed a bit more about how this would work in a new interview with The Washington Post, explaining that it would "take a little bit of time" for development to begin on the new platform, especially if it takes until June 2023 for the acquisition to go through:
“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.”
Spencer was questioned about how well Call of Duty could run on a Nintendo console, and although he admitted it's a different scenario compared to something like Minecraft, there's plenty of experience behind the scenes to make it happen:
"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.”
In a separate interview with The New York Times, Spencer did admit there's "definitely work" to be done to make Call of Duty run efficiently on Nintendo's platform, but nevertheless he clearly seems confident it can be achieved.
It's not just Nintendo that has benefited from the "10-year commitment" from Microsoft, as the Steam platform on PC is also taking advantage of the same offer. Even Sony has been offered the same deal for PlayStation, but according to Microsoft, there's been no response from the company as of yet.