Activision’s decision to drop support for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has reduced its potential marked by 4.3%, according to a new report from analysts S&P, which says that the corresponding launch on Switch 2 – the first time the franchise has been available on a Nintendo console since 2013 – will not make up for the loss of users on legacy consoles.
S&P analyst Neil Barbour, citing the firm’s internal data, said that the newly-announced Call of Duty will be selling into a global installed base of 147.5 million consoles, down 5.6% from the audience for last year’s Black Ops 7, which was widely held to have underperformed.
Sales of new consoles, meanwhile, are likely to be limited by ongoing hardware price increases driven by rising component costs. Sony increased the price of PS5 globally in March, and Xbox prices increased twice in 2025.
The calculation is based on the firm’s audience projection of 36 million PS4 and Xbox One users active by the end of 2026, while the newly-added Switch 2 install base is projected to hit 33.9 million by the same point.
Barbour pointed out that the decision to launch on Switch “was made all the easier by the fact that Microsoft Corp. promised regulators it would do so in an effort to get the Activision Blizzard Inc. acquisition across the finish line.”
In a note to clients, Barbour said that while moving away from older consoles gave developers more headroom to leverage the capabilities of PS5 and Xbox Series S and X, “rolling in the Switch 2 complicates that narrative because it is not nearly as powerful” as other current-gen platforms. “We expect that its more modern architecture will make it easier to scale for, but developers will still have to keep the lower overall performance specifications in mind,” he said.
The Call of Duty franchise has lasted an unusually long time across multiple console generations, with PS4 having been supported for five years following the launch of its successor. PS3 was dropped after only two.
Activision announced it would be changing the franchise release schedule following the sluggish launch of Black Ops 7, and more recently new CoD releases were removed from the firm’s Game Pass subscription service as part of a series of changes by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.
