Microsoft says they wanted to respect Nintendo's approach to how social networks work on Switch, bringing Xbox Live over was 'a lot of work'

In a sentence that would have sound like the ramblings of a madman years ago, Xbox Live features are available for certain games on the Switch. Microsoft and Nintendo have been quite close in recent years, which helped pave the way for this happening. In an interview with GamesBeat, head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty, talks about the process of bringing that service over.

The amount of work, on my side, having been close to what it took to get Xbox Live on the Switch — clearly Nintendo wants to protect their view of how social networks should work on their platform. We want to respect that with how we implement Xbox Live. That’s a lot of work. It’s not like we just showed up with that overnight. People can say, “They finally made the decision to put cross play on the Switch.” But that’s a year and a half in the making. Again, it’s been more of an evolution as opposed to a light switch.