Two weeks before the Nintendo NX controller-image post, Dual Pixels ran a Call of Duty rumor of a different kind. The March 3, 2016 article claimed Activision was developing a Call of Duty entry codenamed “Bloodline” with NX-platform involvement, framed as an attempt to bring the franchise back to Nintendo hardware after years of absence following the Wii U’s struggles.
The post drew 50 backlinks at peak, including pickups from Eurogamer’s German edition, GameRevolution, and several mid-DR aggregators. It was one of the more widely discussed Call of Duty rumors of the early 2016 cycle.
Nine years later, with the Activision-Microsoft acquisition closed and Call of Duty’s platform strategy fully visible, this one is straightforward to score: it was wrong.
What Activision actually shipped
Activision’s 2016 Call of Duty release was Infinite Warfare, developed by Infinity Ward, launched November 4, 2016 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. The game shipped without a Switch version (the Switch hadn’t launched yet) and without any subsequent Switch port. The 2017 release was WWII from Sledgehammer Games, again skipping Nintendo platforms entirely.
No Call of Duty title between 2016 and the present has shipped on Switch as a full first-party Activision release. There has been no codenamed-Bloodline project. The annual release cycle — handled by Treyarch, Sledgehammer, and Infinity Ward in a three-year rotation — has remained PlayStation, Xbox, and PC focused throughout.
The 2024 Microsoft-Activision deal opened a theoretical door to Switch and Switch 2 versions through Microsoft’s stated commitment to bring Call of Duty to “more platforms,” but no concrete Switch release has been announced as of early 2026.
Where the rumor came from
The original post sourced the claim to industry contacts and tied the rumor to broader speculation about Nintendo’s third-party publisher relationships heading into the NX hardware launch. The “Bloodline” codename appeared nowhere else in the rumor cycle and has not surfaced in any subsequent leak, internal Activision documentation made public through litigation, or industry reporting.
The most likely explanation is that the codename and project did not exist as the rumor described. What did exist in early 2016 was a real industry conversation about whether Nintendo’s next console would attract third-party AAA support after the Wii U’s near-total third-party drought. Activision-related rumors specifically circulated in NeoGAF threads from January to March 2016, with Call of Duty as the most-frequently-mentioned absent franchise. The Dual Pixels post appears to have crystallized this loose speculation into a specific named project.
Why the third-party question mattered in 2016
To understand why this rumor got picked up, it helps to remember the third-party situation Nintendo faced in early 2016. The Wii U had launched in November 2012 and by the end of 2015 had sold roughly 11.6 million units worldwide — the worst home-console performance of any major Nintendo platform since the Virtual Boy. Major third-party publishers had largely abandoned the platform by 2014: Activision’s last Wii U Call of Duty was Ghosts in 2013; EA’s last Wii U title was FIFA 13; Ubisoft cut its planned Wii U schedule sharply by mid-2014.
The strategic question heading into the NX launch window was whether Nintendo could regain third-party support. Every rumor that suggested a major third-party franchise was returning to Nintendo platforms therefore got disproportionate attention, because the answer to the third-party question would shape NX’s commercial prospects.
The actual answer turned out to be mixed. The Switch attracted significantly better third-party support than the Wii U, including major Bethesda releases (Skyrim, Doom), Square Enix titles (Dragon Quest, eventually Final Fantasy), Capcom releases, and an extensive indie pipeline. But the AAA-shooter category specifically — Call of Duty, Battlefield, Apex Legends — remained largely absent from Switch through its entire lifecycle.
The structural rumor problem
This rumor illustrates a structural problem with platform-third-party leak coverage. Industry conversations about whether a publisher might bring a franchise to a platform are continuous and largely speculative. Pre-launch hardware cycles compress those conversations into a window where any specific claim — “Bloodline is in development for NX” — gets framed as a leak even when the underlying source material is the same general industry chatter.
A leak that says “Activision and Nintendo are talking” is hard to verify and hard to falsify. A leak that says “Activision has a project codenamed Bloodline targeting NX launch” is much more falsifiable because the codename and project either exist or they don’t. The Dual Pixels post upgraded a soft industry-relationship claim to a hard project-name claim, and the hard claim turned out to be wrong.
Under current editorial standards, the claim would have run as “industry sources continue to speculate about Activision’s interest in Nintendo’s next platform” with explicit framing that no concrete project has been confirmed. The codename would not have appeared without a second-source confirmation of its existence.
What this URL preserves
The original March 3, 2016 post remains at this URL in retrospective form because the inbound citations from German and English-language coverage of the rumor still resolve to this address. Removing the post would break legitimate journalism’s archived links. Modifying the original to claim the rumor was correct would be dishonest. The current article scores the original claim against the actual shipped Activision lineup and explains why the rumor circulated without naming sources who never existed.
For broader coverage of the NX rumor cycle, see the controller image retrospective and the console specifications retrospective. For Call of Duty release coverage, see the site’s News section.