Microsoft enters 10-year commitment to bring 'Call of Duty' to Nintendo platforms

Microsoft just eliminated the CMA's entire rationale with this one move (it's with Steam/Valve too, btw) that the market is only Sony and Microsoft. Not to mention that this move is on the eve of a meeting with FTC members, so this is also going to make it harder for them to challenge this deal now as well, as doing so would put them at odds with consumers, whom they are supposed to always side with.

Extremely shrewd strategy.
Well played, MS.

Comcast made similar promises when they bought Universal, so did at&t when they bought Warner, they both broke their promises very quickly as the government is too corrupt to do anything about it.

It wouldn't surprise me if within weeks if not days they announce that Nintendo hardware isn't up to snuff, blah blah too much of a hurdle to port and can't be done.

I don't play CoD so I don't really care, I just don't like mega mergers.

Thanks Josh Grobot for negotiating this deal with Microsoft.

Talk is cheap. Let's see the finer details of this "commitment". Are they going to be the latest versions or ports of last gen titles? Will they be native or cloud versions? Will they be on the current Switch or a revised version that I believe will release next year? And the timing of this announcement is all very convenient for Microsoft.

This entire shitshow has turned into a complete joke by now.

MS was desperate for exclusives and got Bethesda+, which wasn't too bad for Sony since they could compete with their exclusives (not a good thing for Sony for sure, but anyway). But then MS, the uncreative rich kid, thought to buy one of the biggest gaming IPs of all time (among several others) which made Sony complete desperate because they could lose a huge chunk of their customers and made them pull all strings they could...Which gave results which made MS desperate now since they were 100% certain the deal would go through so now they hug up to Nintendo and make this silly deal with them to let the CoD IP loose on there which is the last place CoD games sell well (in Nintendo's defense though, they have changed their image a lot in recent years and a new console is due long before 10 years, but still..) which is obviously a desperate PR stunt to get approval for the merger.

It's obvious, from all this kindergarden, that CoD is just too big a name for just one of the big three to own, so now I actually hope the deal doesn't go through. I was for it because I wanted, and still want, good competition between the three titans, but after this ...

The joke gets better with Nintendo just leaning back and ejoying the show because they have little if anything to lose here.

(Quoted myself from a Dtoid post)

The wildcard now is if Microsoft will allow Switch-specific versions to be made a la Modern Warfare 3 and Black Ops 1 on Wii, or if they'll just be cloud versions of the multiplatform games since Nintendo has nothing powerful to run a CoD natively. This is assuming if Microsoft just doesn't make a separate original entries for Switch if the multiplatform mainline entries can't fit on Switch.

A previous rumor says Microsoft wants to bring Modern Warfare Remastered to Switch (and not make a port/version of the 2019 game), but that I already know Remastered on Switch would fail because it would be too late a port and it didn't have glowing reviews from other platforms.

Call of Duty may be big, but is it THAT big? Does it approach 50% of A-B's value as an acquisition? 25%? A big fig leaf is still a fig leaf. In fact, the size suggests there's more to cover up.