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Soundwave on 01 December 2018
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curl-6 said:
Soundwave said:

The GameCube and Wii U (when it was market relevant) did get OK third party support. The people who are going to always look at the PS4/XB1 and ask "well OK, yeah we got this one game, but what about this other one" are never going to be happy anyway. Switch is something I bet a lot of devs like and it has 3rd party positive demographics (ie: it's not being sold on the back of casuals). 

The chipset is the only big bottleneck from *some* (not all, but some) third party games being on it. The Square-Enix president for example said he'd like every game on the Switch, it's a technical issue where the game has to be compromised too much or it would be too costly/resource intensive, but you remove that barrier and things change for some devs. 

And that's fine. Inevitably yes there will be some person crying on a message board that Switch Pro got Call of Duty but doesn't have Battlefield and EA are mean and that equals bad third party support because PS4/XB1 have Battlefield. Who cares. 

Thing is though, by 2020 the technical bar for multiplats will have risen so that a Switch Pro won't be any easier to port to in 2020 than the base Switch was in 2017, so if they didn't port to the latter, why would they port to the former?

I don't really buy devs are gonna let go of the PS4/XB1 userbase so quickly even if PS5/XB2 arrive in 2020. Case in point, last gen really took like 2 years to get going, and this gen will probably be worse because you have the PS4 Pro/XB1X. Devs are not going to want to abandon that userbase, and if Switch can comfortably port PS4/XB1 without too much fuss, it can stand to benefit from ports for quite some time, probably well into 2022/2023 when devs get really serious about PS5/XB2 only games.

By which time Nintendo can release another model Switch that can better handle those types of games if they want. A new high end model every 3 years works well for Nintendo IMO, that's enough of a gap, but it's also not too large of a gap where they're stuck with some kind of hardware that really can't run any of the modern games. There's gonna be a new major hardware model for all of Playstation/XBox/Switch every 3 years now give or take I think, it's just going to become the new normal in the industry (I'm not talking just New 3DS or PS4 Slim type revisions either, those will also be there, but full on Pro/X model refreshes). 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 01 December 2018