Call of Duty Came Back to Nintendo After a Decade — and Took 3% of Its Own Launch

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Platform splits are GfK UK physical (boxed) sales for the week ending October 24, 2026, as published October 26 — they exclude all digital downloads. Review scores and Steam figures are as reported at launch, October 23–25, 2026.

The number

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launched on October 23, 2026 — the franchise’s return to Nintendo hardware after more than a decade away — and by every quality measure, it landed. Then the first hard sales data arrived.

GfK’s UK retail chart for the week ending October 24 (published October 26 by Nintendo Life, VGChartz, and others) puts MW4 at No. 1, with this physical platform split:

Three percent. For the most heavily promoted third-party launch in Switch 2’s life, on a port reviewers went out of their way to praise — Nintendo Life called it “best-in-class bombast that doesn’t shortchange Nintendo gamers,” IGN reported being “pleasantly surprised” by campaign performance at a 60fps target, and the Switch 2 version is the full game: 16 campaign missions, the complete multiplayer suite, DMZ, cross-progression, even mouse mode.

The game itself is a genuine comeback story. Metacritic sits at 86, against Black Ops 7’s 65 and Modern Warfare III’s 56. Steam reviews ran over 90% positive — the franchise’s best in more than a decade — with concurrent players near 200,000 at launch, after the campaign-only early access alone crossed 108,000 and beat Black Ops 7’s full launch weekend peak. And notably, MW4 is not a day-one Game Pass title this year, so the Xbox 19% is paid copies, not subscription noise.

The control group is on the same chart

The lazy reading writes itself: Nintendo audiences don’t buy shooters. The same GfK chart refutes it, twice, in the same week:

• Final Fantasy Resonance debuted at No. 4 with 34% of its physical sales on Switch 2 (plus 12% on the original Switch) — a third-party, full-price, non-Nintendo game selling a third of its boxes on Nintendo’s new machine.
• Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, a Switch 2 exclusive launched October 22, debuted at No. 2 — the platform’s owners were in stores, buying software, that week.

So Switch 2 owners buy third-party games at retail, and they buy a lot of software. They specifically did not buy this game in a box. Three non-exclusive explanations, in descending order of how much they excuse Activision:

1. Habit, not hardware. Call of Duty’s audience has a decade of muscle memory — and friends lists, and progression — on PlayStation and Xbox. A returning lapsed CoD player does not comparison-shop platforms; they boot the machine where their account lives. PS5’s 78% is what an entrenched default looks like.
2. Boxed is the wrong lens for this genre on this platform. GfK counts discs and cartridges only. A live-service shooter with a 39GB post-launch update — which the Switch 2 version received within a day, per My Nintendo News — is a product whose Nintendo buyers have every incentive to go digital, and Switch 2’s cartridge economics (large games often ship as key cards) push the same way. The 3% measures boxed share, not player share. It is a floor, not a census.
3. One day of tracking. The chart week ended October 24; the game launched October 23. This is closer to a pre-order-and-day-one snapshot than a launch week, and pre-orders are precisely where entrenched audiences dominate.

What the 3% still tells us

Discount all of that, and the number still bites, because expectations were not modest. This was the test case for whether Switch 2’s stronger hardware would finally make Nintendo a coequal home for the biggest Western franchises — the “age up the audience” strategy built on the Activision partnership. Round one says: the machine is ready, the port is ready, the audience’s defaults are not. Square Enix’s 34% shows Nintendo owners will buy a big third-party game on day one when the franchise’s home was never really elsewhere. Call of Duty’s home is elsewhere, twice over, and a technically excellent port does not move a home.

The honest read for publishers is narrower and more useful than “Switch 2 can’t sell shooters”: budget Nintendo versions of entrenched PlayStation/Xbox live-service franchises as long-tail digital catalogues, not launch-week events — and watch MW4’s digital and second-month numbers before writing the obituary. If the Switch 2 share is still ~3% when downloads are counted, the habit thesis hardens into a verdict. If it doubles or triples, October 26’s chart will be remembered as a boxed-retail artefact — the week the disc lied about where people actually play.

Sources

• GfK UK retail chart, week ending October 24, 2026, as published October 26, 2026 by Nintendo Life (“UK Charts: Switch Sports Resort And Call of Duty Are Fast Off The Starting Block”) and VGChartz (MW4: PS5 78% / Xbox Series 19% / Switch 2 3%; Final Fantasy Resonance: PS5 54% / Switch 2 34% / Switch 12%; Switch Sports Resort debut at No. 2).
• Launch reception: Nintendo Life and IGN Switch 2 reviews (60fps target, full feature set); Metacritic 86 (vs Black Ops 7, 65; Modern Warfare III, 56) via launch-week roundups; Steam ~90%+ positive, campaign early access 108,000+ concurrent (ITHome/SteamDB, October 18), launch concurrents near 200,000.
• My Nintendo News, October 24, 2026 (39GB Switch 2 update). Game Pass note: MW4 not included day one in Game Pass Ultimate, per launch reviews.