Why is the Switch still not getting big games from 3rd parties? October edition

[COKTOE]

AngryLittleAlchemist said:

potato_hamster said:

All you mean Nintendo's policy of price-gouging third parties and limiting the number of titles they could release on NES/SNES per year while not limiting the number of titles they published themselves? Or maybe it was when they started to censor what kind of content third party developers could publish on their platform to a point where Mortal Kombat games couldn't even feature blood? Those kinds of things Nintendo thought they could get away with when they were the only real option. Is that the kind of "bias against Nintendo" you're referring to? And it's not like it got any better from there. Just look into Nintendo's history with Argonaut games.

Third parties never liked working with Nintendo, they've always been by far the most difficult to work, the most anal about shit that really doesn't matter. Getting a game certified by Nintendo was like pulling teeth. Third parties worked with Nintendo for the NES because they had little other choice. it was the only real viable platform at the time. But when other first parties like Sega, Sony and Microsoft gave third parties viable options to work with, third parties didn't have to put up with Nintendo's shit anymore, so they didn't. It's taken over 20 years, but Nintendo's finally started to lighten up and be more willing to work with third parties, but you know, it's a bit late.

TL;DR Nintendo were giant dicks and no one wanted to work with them, not the other way around.

At the same time, didn't Sony have a lot of restrictions for devs already by the time the PS2 came around? I specifically remember hearing about how Sony tried to enforce restrictions so that third parties wouldn't put their games onto other consoles, and one of the restrictions actually ended up biting them in the ass because it made Rockstar put more effort into their GTA port for Xbox, which made them the superior versions.

Really, I think the biggest reason is sales. By the time Playstation started fucking up in a lot of the same ways as Nintendo (with both of them having their 3rd home consoles being disasters), Playstation was too big of a brand worldwide to lose third parties entirely. It had Europe on lockdown, was very competitive in Japan and America, and it essentially owned the world. If it was just about how many problems one company had, PS3 wouldn't have ended the generation having caught up with Xbox 360. 

I don't really remember Sony having any restrictions in the PS2 era that were out of step with Sega, MS, or Nintendo. Maybe you're right, but if there was such a discrepancy, my cursory search didn't turn up anything. It WAS a bitch to make games for, and that could end up costing devs more $$$ to make games than they would have liked, but that's a different ballgame. As for the bolded: I was always under the impression that the GTA games were superior on the XB simply because the hardware allowed it. I can't think of a example when a multiplat title wasn't superior on the XB. GTA III/Vice City were quite lovely on the XB. Definitely better looking than it's PS2 counterparts. I played the PS2 versions much more though, because my specific model of Xbox was incapable of saving game data with GTA. Went through several copies until I found out what the issue was, and exchanged the GTA Double Pack for PGR2.

 

-edit. I may be way behind on this post. did't read the follow up.