Activision boss Bobby Kotick briefed on Switch 2 last December
Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick was briefed by Nintendo on Switch 2 in December last year.
Emails between Activision executives — made public as part of the FTC's court case with Microsoft and published today by The Verge, albeit with many redactions — show that the company's controversial boss Bobby Kotick spoke with Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa about Switch 2 at the end of 2022.
Activision exec Chris Schnakenberg noted that the console was expected to be weigh in with a «closer alignment to Gen 8 platforms in terms of performance», referring to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation of consoles.
«It is reasonable to assume we could make something compelling for the NG [next-generation] Switch as well,» Schnakenberg wrote. «It would be helpful to secure early access to development hardware prototypes and prove that out nice and early.»
The details give further clarity on Nintendo's timeline for prepping Switch 2 — which is now widely-expected to arrive in 2024 — but also Kotick and Microsoft's own comments on Call of Duty's future on Nintendo consoles.
Two months after Activision executives had apparently peered at Switch 2 details, Microsoft president Brad Smith was publicly able to outline Microsoft's plan to bring Call of Duty to «Nintendo devices» (unspecified) should the Activision Blizzard deal go through.
Later that month, Microsoft announced it had finalised a binding 10-year agreement to launch Call of Duty on Nintendo platforms on «the same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity».
The matter of whether Nintendo consoles could run Call of Duty was picked up on by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which criticised Microsoft's claim that the Switch could run Call of
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