PlayStation head doesn't think Call of Duty aligns with the 'standard Nintendo audience'
Well...yes and no
The Microsoft Vs. FTC legal battle has been full of all sorts of drama, crazy moments, embarrassing discussions and more, and there’s sure to be plenty of other notable comments as the week rolls on.
If you’ve been following along, you know that Nintendo has actually come up quite a bit in the legal discussions so far. While most of the conversation centered on what Call of Duty on Switch would be like and how the Switch in general should be classified, Sony wants everyone to know that Nintendo fans don’t even care about the franchise.
PlayStation boss Jim Ryan doesn’t consider Nintendo a direct competitor to Sony’s console, and to some degree that’s correct. Obviously the Switch and PS5 are in competition with one another in the general games market, but in terms of hardware and specs overall, the two platforms are incredibly different. That said, for Sony to ignore what Nintendo does with their hardware would certainly be to their great peril.
Should Microsoft succeed in purchasing Activision Blizzard, they’ve already pledged to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms with feature parity. Sony thinks this doesn’t really matter, as when Ryan was asked about why previous Call of Duty titles on Nintendo platforms didn’t perform well, he shared the following:
“(Call of Duty is aimed at a) very different audience than the standard Nintendo audience that enjoys Mario and Zelda, not Call of Duty.”
I’m sure there are plenty of Nintendo fans who would argue that the lack of feature parity was a big reason for skipping over Call of Duty on Nintendo platforms. Along with that, many Nintendo followers feel Call of Duty on Nintendo platforms has always been an afterthought, and never really given the attention it needs in terms of development.
Would a full-fat Call of Duty game perform well on Switch or subsequent Nintendo systems? I guess we’ll have to see how the Microsoft legal battle goes to find out!
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sdsichero
11M agoThanks for telling us what kind of games we like to play Ryan. Sheesh.
lucius6
11M agoI hate this sc*mbag, like who does he think he is to tell what people like and don’t like, I hope the activision deal with Microsoft goes through just to trigger his insecure a*s…
enthropy
11M agoIn all honesty the general Nintendo market is the ones who plays the Marios, Pokemons, Zeldas etc. And those are also the games that sell the most on Nintendo systems.
If you look at the sales the Wii sales seem to OK at best. WiiU? Well, that's obviously even worse. And there was eve a DS version I see. So compared to the PS and XB you can see he kinda has a point.
But I love a console with a wide variety of games in all genres and that's where the Switch is killing it. I get my Mario and Zelda love, but also all the Platinum love and Fatal Frame games. But I wouldn't get a CoD game on any system.
The Switch is different from seevral previous Nintendo consoles in that it has brought back the "hardcore" gamer to Nintendo, so I guess a CoD game on Switch (or better Switch 2) could sell decently if MS' Activision would put effort into it.
lionk
11M agoNo competition with Nintendo? But soon there will be a Sony portable again. It'll look better than the Switch (or that might be the aim at least) and has the power of a PS5.
ngamer01
11M ago'First person shooters don't work on Nintendo.'
>> Goldeneye Wii and Black Ops 1 were the most popular Wii shooters.
>> Black Ops 2 would have been the top Wii U shooter, except it got kneecapped by Nintendo's collapse of Wii U.
Activision used the failure of Ghosts to say their games aren't for Nintendo and dropped all support until Nintendo Switch and Crash Bandicoot brought Activision back (but even then the execs at Activision believed Nintendo Switch couldn't run the Crash trilogy and had to be proven how wrong and out-of-touch they were).
If Jim Ryan headed up Activision, he'd refuse any Activision IP on Nintendo platforms out of spite with the stereotypical "Nintendo is for kiddies, hue hue hue."
hawk
11M agoI'll be honest, I hate the idea of people pigeonholing and stereotyping owners of Nintendo consoles, but it's mostly true in my case. I play mostly Nintendo games on my Switch, or "Nintendo-like" games. FPS games all happen on my PC. But never on any system would I play Call of Duty.
Still, this whole idea has become a circular, self-fulfilling assumption. Nintendo gamers play Nintendo games because that's nearly all of what they're given. And publishers won't give them much of anything else because "Nintendo gamers play Nintendo games". And I guess in their defense, we know what we're in for when we buy a Nintendo consoles and would buy something else if we wanted different games.
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