Warzone Is Free on Switch 2 — and Done on PS4 and Xbox One

Season 1 of Call of Duty: Warzone went live at midnight ET on November 6, and it moved the game twice in the same motion. On one side, Warzone launched on Nintendo Switch 2 — free to play, on Nintendo hardware for the first time in the franchise's history. On the other side, the same update ended Warzone on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Activision's own launch post puts the two facts a few paragraphs apart, like they're the most normal thing in the world.

Start with the side that gained something. “The start of Season 1 marks the launch of Call of Duty: Warzone on Nintendo Switch 2,” the official post reads. “Drop into Hajin, Zodiac, and all the other maps and playlists as the free-to-play game arrives on the handheld system for the first time.” That last clause is doing real work: this is not a stripped companion app or a cloud-streamed compromise, at least not on paper. Switch 2 players get the full Season 1 slate — the new Hajin battle royale map, the new Zodiac Resurgence map, and the same playlists running everywhere else, inside the full Modern Warfare 4 integration. Raven Software's Season 1 patch notes, published today, say it the same way: Warzone “expands to Nintendo Switch 2, bringing the new Modern Warfare 4 experience to an additional platform,” with “new maps, weapons, modes, and progression systems” included.

Watch: the official Season 1 launch trailer (Call of Duty).

The season they'd be dropping into is a big one. Hajin is a Korean Peninsula map with 13 major points of interest and variable weather — clear, fog, wind, rain, storms — plus a new Gulag. Zodiac is a drone-manufacturing facility in South Korea with 10 points of interest, moving trains and underground tunnels. Verdansk and Rebirth Island both return later in the season. Player levels reset with the Modern Warfare 4 integration, all 33 of MW4's launch weapons are in, and content carried forward from Modern Warfare II, III and the last two Black Ops games — operators, skins, blueprints, calling cards — comes with your account.

Now the other side of the trade, because for millions of players it is the whole story. Activision's note is one sentence long and it does not soften anything: “Starting with Season 1, Call of Duty: Warzone will no longer be playable on PlayStation 4 and XBOX One as the game — and Modern Warfare 4 — moves on from older generation hardware.” That was November 6. If your Warzone life lived on a PS4 or an Xbox One, it ended last week — not at some announced date next year, not at the end of a farewell season. The wind-down had been staged through 2026, per Activision Support's platform update: the game came off the last-gen storefronts in June, the in-game store closed later that month, and play continued only until the new season started. The cutoff applies to Warzone specifically; other Call of Duty titles on those consoles are unaffected.

What survives the move is your account. Both the blog and the patch notes repeat the same promise: progression carries over to a supported platform when you sign in with the same linked Activision account. Your operators, your blueprints, your history — portable. Your console is the only thing being retired.

One honest gap belongs in this story, because players will go looking for it: Activision has published no frame-rate target, no resolution target, and no official Warzone file size for the Switch 2 version — not in the launch post, not in today's patch notes. Numbers circulating online are not Activision's; the one concrete figure in circulation, a roughly 122 GB total Call of Duty install measured by Nintendo Life on its own Switch 2, is a reported measurement of the whole CoD footprint, not a Warzone spec. How the handheld actually holds up in a 120-player Massive Resurgence lobby on Hajin is a question the hardware will answer in players' hands this week, not one a press post can settle in advance.

The rest of Season 1's fine print is worth a player's minute. Tactical Sprint is now available to every operator without a perk. Private Match is disabled for the whole season and returns in Season 2. And RICOCHET Anti-Cheat has opened a new front against “Warzone Agent,” the unauthorized paid lobby-shopping app — detection notices, access restrictions, and possible account or hardware bans for working around them.

So the generation trade is complete, and it happened in a single patch. A Nintendo handheld picked up the biggest battle royale in the business, free, with the full season attached. Two consoles that carried Warzone for years put it down for the last time — with their players' accounts packed and ready to move, whether those players own anything newer to move to or not.