Regarding Switch third party support: Developers don't care about power

[DonFerrari]

GoOnKid said:

DonFerrari said:

Still, releasing 10% of the products and retaining 70% of the marketshare is to much.

Do you have any idea how this could be changed?

Some.But we will always go eggs or chicken on it.

To get the biggest releases Nintendo would need to have launched a stronger HW.

3rd parties won't likely make exclusives tailored to Switch because they would lose over 100M userbase on PS4X1.

The games that can be ported without much hussle are going one after another to Switch.

But if you want to go and consider that 70% of sales is because there aren't other SW competing (the 10% shows you are wrong) and some of those 90% SW are multiplats that sold considerably better on PS4X1 (like Fifa).

As I always say, it is Nintendo HW. So if they want more ports of bigger games (that wouldn't be a simple work) they should get in talk and perhaps even help finance the porting. It's a long work.

Mnementh said:

DonFerrari said:

Still, releasing 10% of the products and retaining 70% of the marketshare is to much.

There are two reasons for it:

First: Nintendo is an insanely successful game maker.

Second: Most high prolific games aren't releasing on Nintendo platforms.

See, Ubisoft would have much higher sales on Switch, if the had released Destiny, Assassins Creed, For Honor and Far Cry. Because currently these high profile IPs add to the sales for Ubisoft games on Switch... nothing.

Yes such an easy task to release those games on Switch right? Just row a slider and done.

You can fairly compare only the games released on all platforms: Just Dance, Fractured but Whole, Doom, Skyrim, Wolfenstein. Many of these are old ports. Hmm, VGC has no data (yet?) for Switch sales of South Park and Wolfenstein. For Skyrim I gfo with the special edition as the release for PS4 and XB1.

	PS4	Xbox One	Switch
Just Dance 2018	0.25M	0.18M	0.53M
Doom	2.58M	1.36M	0.33M
Skyrim	3.04M	1.69M	0.82M
Minecraft: Story Mode	0.87M	0.77M	0.34M
Dragon Quest Builders	0.58M	-	0.15M
Disgaea 5	0.35M	-	0.30M
Lego Worlds	0.93M	0.55M	0.38M
FIFA 18	11.01M	2.86M	0.81M
NBA 2K18	3.05M	1.85M	0.35M
Puyo Puyo Tetris	0.10M	-	0.42M

So, do 3rd-party games sell worse on Nintendo-platforms? Yes. Is it that bad as painted by the data cited by Meggiddo? No, because that is because many games are not released on Nintendo in the first place. So, the 70% market share is because the other game makers leave the platform to Nintendo. What should Nintendo do? Not release games?

10 games showed as third parties show the 90% of SW released? Nope. Are all the rest garbage level that no one would buy? I doubt it.

So, these numbers do indeed explain why 3rd-parties are shy to release on Nintendo-platforms. No need to angle for power-explanations or conspiracies or anything. But the dominance of Nintendo-software is because basically so many games are missing on the platform.

We will see more data in the future, with more multi-platform releases like Dark Souls Remastered, Dragon Quest XI and so on.

You know that Nintendo dominance on their HW goes way back to when games started being multiplat right? And I particularly have no issue with they selling good on their HW, after all they make their HW to tailor their SW.

The only issue I have is people that think the 3rd parties doesn't release because they want to screw Nintendo over. Power helps the problem (the easier to port, the less it will cost, most likely to get released), lack of market interest in the platform helps, bad relationship of the past help. Nintendo can't solve the power problem in a HW already released. But they can work out APIs that would make porting simpler, they could negotiate some high profile games to be ported with their help (which as far as we know they don't do, Sony done a lot on PS3 and I think MS also does) or funding.

All in all, Switch is an excellent HH capable of playing Console level games to a decent standard, but mainly done to play Nintendo games (and considering how many and how good they are, someone just playing Nintendo won't be starved for games).

Pemalite said:

TheMisterManGuy said:

Square Enix even said that its very similar to the PS4 in terms of core architecture.

Square Enix is wrong.
ARM and Maxwell is extremely different to x86 and Graphics Core Next.

The similarities that the Switch and Playstation 4 have is actually on the software side... Both leverage a *nix derived OS, both share common API's like OpenGL and Vulkan.

Nem said:
They do.

If you got a sucessful underpowered system, they obviously care about making money, so they will make cheap ports if it's worth it and technicly feasible, for an easy buck. But, the latest stuff doesn't come over. But, it's obviously not the only issue.

This. It all comes down to whether it is financially feasible, said feasibility will obviously increase with the more hardware units that have been shifted... To the point where sometimes companies can justify creating a game+game engine almost entirely from scratch to take full advantage of said lower specced machine.

RolStoppable said:
AAA publishers want their business centered on PS and Xbox, so PC and Nintendo routinely get the short end of the stick.

PC gets the majority of Multiplats? Very rarely does the PC miss out on a big AAA multiplatform exclusive.

Conina said:

And Doom ain't a highly demanding game.

Well. Yes and no. It has some technical showcases that can't be ignored.
But the main reason why it got a port to the Switch was because it was a 60fps title, there was tons of room to move by cutting that down to 30fps and making some visual concessions elsewhere.

The big strength the Switch has is that from a GPU feature set perspective it is equivalent (And in some aspects exceeds) the Xbox One and Playstation 4... Which is something the WiiU or Wii didn't share.

Soundwave said:
I don't think it's as simple as anything can be ported. Porting from a 1.2 TFLOP console (XBox One) to run on a portable that needs to be at 153 GFLOPS for portable mode isn't easy.

Flops is a theoretical performance ceiling and not representative of real-world performance.