Activision posts 3 job listings pointing to Call of Duty on Switch

Activision has posted 3 job listings that point to Call of Duty's return to Nintendo platforms, one step in fulfilling an ambitious 10-year contract to bring future COD shooters to the Switch.

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Activision's Call of Duty teams are seeking new developers that have experience making games on the Nintendo Switch. The publisher has published 3 job listings that mention Nintendo and/or the Switch platform, strongly indicating that the company is moving forward with its legally-binding agreement to bring the franchise to Nintendo hardware. In 2023, Microsoft signed a 10-year contract to bring future Call of Duty games to the Switch with full feature and content parity. This deal was struck in order to assuage worldwide regulators that Call of Duty would not be made exclusive and was a key development to get the world's largest tech acquisition--Xbox's $68.7 billion buyout of Activision--passed and approved.

Infinity Ward is hiring a principal engineer, which lists "console development experience (Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo)" as a plus. Infinity Ward is also hiring a lead build engineer that lists "(PlayStation/Xbox/Nintendo/Windows)" as the multiple gaming platforms that go through testing and support in the role. Sledgehammer Games is currently hiring a senior technical animator that lists "AAA Mobile or Switch experience" as a bonus.

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It's possible that 2026's annual Call of Duty release could launch on the Switch 2, and perhaps even the base Switch model, despite Activision CEO Bobby Kotick's initial misgivings of the platform due to its weaker specifications.

Next year's Call of Duty is reportedly Modern Warfare 4 set in both North and South Korea, yet Microsoft has yet to make any official announcements.

In 2023, during the height of the merger clearance talks, Microsoft publicly stated that the Activision acquisition would bring Call of Duty to 150 million more players.

As we said at the time, that statement would only be true if Microsoft chooses to bring Call of Duty to the base Switch 1 console. Microsoft's "150 million more players" figure is a combination of two figures that were current at the time: NVIDIA GeForce streaming subscribers (25 million) combined with the install base of the Switch at the time (~122.5 million). Call of Duty is on cloud, and that adds tens of millions of users via Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, but there's still many millions of users not being served in the way that Microsoft had promised in its full-page Financial Times ad from 2023.

Perhaps Call of Duty will be one of the games headlining Microsoft's new free ad-supported Xbox cloud game streaming option?

There's no guarantee that a Call of Duty release on the base Switch will happen, as the Switch 1 is markedly weaker than the Switch 2, however it's just an interesting statement of fact that could go against Microsoft's public-facing promises.