Microsoft has been in charge of Call Of Duty for all of three months or so and already they’re laying off 30% of the development teams and rumours are suggesting two Black Ops sequels and another Modern Warfare? I don’t like to get involved in console war talk but I think it’s fair to say that this has not been a good time for Xbox. And they were doing so well with the Developer_Direct?
Call Of Duty fans don’t tend to agree on anything but I got the impression that a lot of people, probably the majority, were okay with Microsoft buying Activision, so long as the games stay multiformat. I saw a lot of people talking about how Xbox would be pumping more money into the games. The idea was that if they’re spending that amount of money to buy it then they must have tons more sloshing around to spend on development.
I think it’s clear now that the opposite is true: buying them was so expensive that they immediately have to start making cuts, which is obviously not going to be good for the games. If this year’s is a good one then that will silence a lot of fears but I’m beginning to think this has already caused some damage to the franchise and the way fans think of Call Of Duty. If the next game is not good then all they’re going to blame is Microsoft, which I imagine is not what they were planning for.
It seems increasingly clear that Xbox is preparing to sideline its console business and concentrate more on mobile, given they’re now allowed to run their own app store. But I don’t get what exactly they’re going to be pushing. Sure, they’ve got King, but they don’t make that many new games a year and anything brand new, since being bought by Microsoft, is going to take a good year or so.
So what else does Xbox on mobile mean? Microsoft’s xCloud service is basically the worst out of all the current ones, and Microsoft said they weren’t focusing on it anyway, so streaming can’t be their plan. And even if it was, are people really going to want to play complicated modern console games with a touchscreen?
More importantly how are they going to pay for them? It’s been proven again and again that nobody is willing to pay full price, or anything close to it, for a mobile game. There is Game Pass but that’s not nearly popular enough to be their whole business. Either they’ve got a very secret cunning plan or this is just not going to work out.
I’m not going to say it’s a shame the Switch 2 is rumoured to have a LCD screen because I completely understand why. A more powerful Switch is going to be expensive – more than the £310 of the Switch OLED Model, I’d imagine – and Nintendo will be looking to keep the price down wherever they can, which is a good and sensible thing to do.
We all know they’ll release a OLED version eventually but I do wish they’d do it straight away at launch, just so we’ve got the option. I’m sure they won’t, because they want to pump out as many standard ones as possible and they won’t want to confuse things like with the Xbox Series S, but still – I’m going to hope for it anyway.
I’m not going to say I’ve got full confidence in Nintendo because I haven’t and that’s part of why I respect them so much. As someone else said, they’re willing to take a chance and if it doesn’t work out then they’ll just try something else next time. My gut feeling is that Switch 2 will be a winner but either way it’s going to be fun finding out.
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