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.
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.
Phelpssan@lemmy.world 2 days 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 like another example of this.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 days 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.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day 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