2w ago

Digital Foundry is backing up the claims that Nintendo seems to be discouraging switch 2 development from third parties

Saw this on some other sites. I was wondering why I didnt see too much development by 3rd parties for switch 2 specifically. There are messages online to use Switch 1 ATM because the dev kits are not available.

Comments

Phelpssan @lemmy.world 2w ago
The Switch 2 launch felt oddly rushed.
Lack of details, initial backward compatibility list having only ~20% of games with basic testing finished, the need for SD Express cards that are hard to find. Even the GCK situation is probably due to cost/availability issues that will improve over time.
This DevKit situation looks to me like another example of this.
- NuXCOM_90Percent @lemmy.zip 2w ago
  
  The Switch 1 launch was also a shitshow. Their big launch title was literally a Wii U game and they had the same hodge podge of "what if wii sports but now". They just had "the nindies" and... yeah.
  Considering that Nintendo have actually always genuinely innovated in terms of marketing and more or less set the gold standard for the modern "just communicate direct to consumers"? I increasingly don't believe that they have this secret vault of finished games that are ready to go whenever. They are just as fucked as everyone else. They just figured out they can tell Leakers that they actually totally have twelve games ready to release Whenever and that gets regurgitated since basically all of the remnants of games media grew up on Nintendo.
- prole @lemmy.blahaj.zone 2w ago
  Yeah I was wondering why the Donkey Kong game didn't come out until a month later when it should probably have been a launch title
NuXCOM_90Percent @lemmy.zip 2w ago
Yeah.
Before the theory was just that Nintendo was actively snubbing devs with ties to tencent and the like (Digital Extremes have been pretty open that they did not have a devkit to port Warframe). Which, to be fair, would actually be a large percentage of the market because... Tencent.
But there has been increasing backdoor reports from devs that this is a broader effort and that many of the studios who DO have dev kits are under contract to not release until (if memory serves) early 2026. Jeff Gerstmann talked about this on one of his recent podcasts after a studio reached out to him and he corroborated it with his contacts (can't imagine who they would be...).
Which makes sense when you remember how anti-consumer Nintendo is. The Switch 1 was more or less carried for the first two-ish years by "nindies"... many of which were cross platform anyway. And if their console is just the place you go to play third party games but at lower framerates and resolutions... we call that The Wii U.
- mesa @piefed.social 2w ago
  Given that there is already work on Switch 2 emulators, it wouldn't surprise me that Nintendo is trying to curtail the emulation crowd until they get more of their $$. And dev kits have had people reverse engineer them a while back.
  
  NuXCOM_90Percent @lemmy.zip 2w ago
  And there goes the usual Nintendo Defense Force.
  These are not random fly by night devs asking for devkits. They are pretty major players in the industry, many of which make games that make Nintendo a lot of money. Contracts and tracking (which already exist and are why game dev halted during COVID) are very much doable here.
- Echo Dot @feddit.uk 2w ago
  Unemployee in a local second-hand shop that was telling another customer the reason they have loads of switch 2s in is because there is basically nothing to play on them. You get it play the limited number of games that Nintendo have made and then does nothing else to do. So people sell them.
  
  zecg @lemmy.world 2w ago
  Unemployee in a local second-hand shop
  You should have asked an employee instead.
  
  prole @lemmy.blahaj.zone 2w ago
  Yeah Mario Kart and Donkey Kong are the only two games. DK is great, and MK is cool if you're into that I guess... But it's pretty ridiculous

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