Ok, I've been scratching my head for a couple of days now so this is an honest question.  Does anyone here have an idea as to why Nintendo hasn't lift their NDA for 3rd party games on the Switch?

I mean, they're just basically giving devs less than three months to advertise their games.  And maybe three months is actually fine, but wouldnt five or six be better?

And the way I see it, everytime a developer even mentions the Switch that becomes free advertisament for the system.  I mean, from a marketing standpoint I can only see benefits here.

PS:  This is the first time that I follow a console launch this closely, so I don't know if this the norm.  Has always been like that with the other consoles?  (I guess that makes it two questions)

Until Nintendo does their official reveal and not just a few minute teaser trailer they won't want any of the 3rd party devs going out and talking about it because they fear they may go off-script or off-message with regards to how Nintendo wants the console initially viewed.  No one talked about their XB1 or PS4 games prior to those consoles being revealed.  Though granted, there was a larger window between official reveal and release on those.

It makes no sense if there's some sort of strict NDA on third parties announcing games for the Switch but yet some have already openly announced games for it. Is it that certain developers are being given the green light or are they just revealing them anyway because they want to, such as how Sega already announced Sonic 2017 for it and such a while back. 

Could be possible. I could see RDR2 being such a huge announcement for the event that they possibly didn't want Rockstar revealing it for Switch at the same time it was revealed for other consoles. 

And thank them for it because otherwise we wouldn't have gotten the greatest thread in VGC history.

They want to keep rumors away until the actual reveal, which isn't working well anyways :p

it's for the surprise factor, most likely an agreement with third parties.

You know, you might be right.  Maybe they're just going for the biggest impact.

That's not entirely true.  Everytime a developer puts a label that says   "Available on X console",  they are indirectly advertising said console.

They basically want to condense the hype into a small period of time.