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Johnw1104 on 18 April 2017
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Hiku said:
Johnw1104 said:

As I said above, I mentioned Wii mainly to show that 3rd parties will find ways to supply a console with games if it sells well even if the console is weak.

But they didn't...
Every popular Japanese franchise majorly ignored the Wii. And the exceptions were very very few.
If that's the future you hope for when it comes to Switch third party ports, then you're setting the bar extremely low and won't be disapointed. And instead of Resident Evil 7, we will get a Resident Evil 5 port.

There is a massive difference between the two, though, in that 3rd party ports from modern games are very much feasible for the Switch, whereas direct ports were almost impossible back in the Wii days. The Switch has been designed to be as easy to design for as any console you'll find, and modern game engines have made scaling faaar more possible than the very hardware-limited environment that existed back with the PS3/X360/Wii.

It's not that massive because engine compatibility is limited by hardware. I have an Intel Core i5 processor and an AVGA Geforce GTX graphics card. My computer architexture is properly equipped to handle the Unreal 4 engine. Except for one litle problem. They run like absolute garbage even when I scale things down to the lowest settings. Because my specs are below the minimum recommended specs.

Yes, Wii had other issues as well, such as the controlls. But I've mentioned how WiiU handled the Unreal Engine 3 as well.

The Japanese certainly avoided the Wii, but they're the least of the Switch's concerns in regards to 3rd party support in my opinion. We're already seeing some ports coming in and, given the decline of consoles in Japan and the surprisingly strong launch in said country (along with the fading off of the Vita and 3DS), it's very possible that the Switch will become the main platform for many of those devs going forward.

Engine compatibility is indeed limited by hardware, but the Switch is capable of running engines like Unreal Engine 4 and Frostbite and so far seems to be doing a decent job with the former. How badly a game is effected from scaling down would certainly vary from game to game, but most of the issues could be ironed out if a Dev wanted to provide a port for the Switch unless it is something that directly affects gameplay (such as AI, physics and so forth).

Here's a video I thought was pretty cool that shows Nintendo really reached out a lot more than with previous consoles to take advice from 3rd party devs... Capcom actually convinced them to improve the hardware (thank god for capcom lol) so that they could port their new RE 7 engine to it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87y-otUWsBs

They really did take advice from other 3rd party developers (Capcom wasn't the only one to offer hardware suggestions), and that reaching out will certainly help when it comes to receiving ports.