Why are third party games selling well on Switch?

[MajorMalfunction]

Alkibiádçs said:

MajorMalfunction said:

Cost of carts mainly. All three take a chunk of sales as revenue (licensing). These costs are unavoidable, but for NSW, a 32 GB carts costs $20 or more / each. 8GB carts are in line with what MS/Sony charge for BD-50s used by XB1/PS4. 16 GB carts are in the middle. I did not include development costs, as those vary with engines, development teams, etc. You can get  a firm number by limiting to publishing costs only. On Wii U, Ubisoft went on the record saying an Wii U port was about 1m euros, but that was in-house. That's old information, but we later found out that no content changes were done, only code through leaked info. I didn't include this information because it varies by game and port choices (in-house vs. out-sourced).

Only one game on Switch uses the 32GB cart, so publishing cost isn't more expensive on Switch, except for that one game, that only released in Japan...

16 GB carts cost more than $12, which is what the 8 GB cart costs. It's somewhere between, $12 and $20+, as indicated by the article. Keep in mind, that businesses lives in that margin. Undersell, or overship, as a game company is not a good situation to be in. Another factor is fear, as not all games sell equally to all audiences. If they see that certain types of games don't do well enough,  they act out of fear that they will lose money.