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superchunk on 12 July 2017
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sethnintendo said:
superchunk said:

or... middleware that is used to build all games has high levels of scaleability and as devs are beginning to get more comfortable with their middleware's support of Switch, more games will be thrown at it. 

Considering 2K used NBA2K18 as a way to add Switch support to their respective middleware, WWE2K18 is able to refine that further at a lower cost. I would expect more 2K games to continue this trend and use the same PS4/XBO build scaled appropriately to Switch.

With EA doing the same on FIFA18, I would expect '19 games to become Switch as well. (and so one with other teams as they add support for switch in their highly-scaleable middleware)

 

If EA was doing the same then where the hell is Madden. Perhaps they don't want a bomb yet. As much hate I put on EA it actually looks like they tried a little with FIFA Switch. I can imagine the board meeting right now... Alright guys we've screwed over Nintendo fans like crazy except for our last game which was a late Criterion NFS port. I believe we've gutted and assigned them to a task lesser than their former selves. Let's do this for Criterion!

It takes time and money to build a game. 2K was likely able to put their efforts for NBA and WWE in sequence where FIFA and MADDEN are likely built synchronously. So the work to upgrade EAs middleware was being done on FIFA (a more global title than Madden) but could not be incorporated to the planning and execution of Madden. This is of course my speculation, but it makes logical sense. Guess we'll see as '19 year games are announced.

Any of these companies will want to recoup dev work done to their middleware for Switch support. They will do that by spreading the benefit out to multiple games that all utilize the same engine. The yearly sports titles are perfect for that. So long as Switch remains a viable selling platform, we'll see all the yearly titles in 2019 as 2018 focused on 1) recognizing it launched well 2) putting dev work into the middleware to support Switch (which consequently due to its architecture, is far easier than it was for Wii or WiiU).