Yesterday, Xbox head Phil Spencer announced that Microsoft has “entered into a 10-year commitment to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo”. Why? I think we all know why.
The thing is, how well would Call of Duty perform on Nintendo consoles? Not just in terms of gameplay, but in terms of sales too? My best guess (based on the previous Call of Duty entries on Nintendo consoles) is… Not Great!
The first Call of Duty game to hit a Nintendo console was Call of Duty 3 in 2006. While receiving fairly healthy Metacritic scores in the 80s on other consoles, the Wii version of the game stands the lowest at an aggregated score of 69. (Editor’s note: Nice — David)
While we can’t judge a game purely on its Metacritic scores, and the scores themselves aren’t the absolute worst, it still seems like a given that a Call of Duty player’s first choice for playing the game probably wouldn’t be on a Nintendo Console.
Since then, every Call of Duty title to appear on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo WiiU has consistently drawn the lowest ratings compared to their direct rivals. All of them, that is, except for two: Black Ops II and Ghosts for the Nintendo WiiU, which both curiously rated higher than the PC versions.
The WiiU was quite an enigma when it came to Call of Duty games. Performance-wise, they outshone previous renditions of Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles, which makes sense considering the WiiU was Nintendo’s first jump to HD graphics, as well as online services being a step up from previous consoles (and free).
However, the poor reception of the WiiU itself meant that the Call of Duty games that did release on the console (despite their better quality) did not make up much of the sales overall. According to VGChartz and Statista, Call of Duty: Black Ops II for WiiU accounted for 1.4% of total sales of the game. According to NintendoEverything, Call of Duty: Ghosts accounted for less than 1% of the total sales of the game.
Sure, the Nintendo Switch was the handheld-home-fusion console of everyone’s dreams upon release. It’s important to note though that multi-platform games for next-gen consoles (including the Nintendo Switch) are generally favoured performance-wise on every console that isn’t the Nintendo Switch.
That is, of course, if you don’t think about the Call of Duty mobile games, which would probably run great on a Nintendo Switch. All that being said, despite Nintendo getting lucky with this new deal with Microsoft, I’m doubtful as to whether or not it actually came from a true desire to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo consoles or if it was simply a move to calm the legal storm.
What do you think?
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