EA: "There isn't much room for other titles than 1st party on Switch"

[Slownenberg]

Machina said:

I think the issue is more complicated than that, and than many who want to see more third party support are willing to acknowledge. It's also more complicated than I'm about to write about, but I'm going to try and put the thoughts flying around my head into words:

Nintendo's audience has always been quite unique, whereas the other manufacturers have pretty much identical audiences, in terms of audience taste at any rate. I know there's some difference - we saw for example splits for a lot of third party games favoured PS4 over XO even more than the install market shares should have resulted in, but for the mostpart they're very, very similar.

There's certainly room for third parties on Nintendo consoles, and they can succeed, but often not if they're just regurgitating whatever it is they're releasing on Microsoft and Sony's platforms, especially where said regurgitation requires additional work to make it on par with the PS4/XO versions, soon to be PS5/XSX.

They need to put in effort, which in a way is a credit to Nintendo's fan base, in that it won't just buy 'Game X, 2020 Edition, Inferior Version'. And even when effort is put in there's very much a feeling that it's as likely to falter as it is to sell massive amounts. When 'Game X, 2020 Edition' can sell 10 million+ across Xbox, PlayStation, and PC I can understand why they're not so willing to risk putting in work to make 'New IP for Nintendo Fans', or even 'Game X, 2020 Edition, Main Version', when it's as likely to sell <1 million as it is 5 million+.

So, they often make excuses - EA being a prime example of a company that does this. 'Game X, 2020 Edition, Inferior Version' sold worse than any individual 'Main Version', and 'New IP for Nintendo Fans' did lukewarm to the point of irrelevance, so... why bother? It's too difficult and not worth the effort really, other than from a PR perspective.

None of these third party developers can create and cultivate an IP that would appeal to the main driver in the Nintendo audience that propels the likes of Mario Kart and Zelda to 5 million+ even on the worst performing Nintendo consoles. And if they could it probably wouldn't perform well on the PS5/XSX, so they're limiting their potential audience to a segment of one console's install base that's always been the hardest for them to capture, which makes it too risky to try.

And if Nintendo fans really want to play EA's output they'll just buy an 'Xbox Dumb Name That Seems Designed to Confuse Everyone', a PC, or a 'PS4,5,6,7,8,9' anyway, so.... *shrug*

I think part of it is a combo of four things.

1) Third parties simply don't put in the effort to make AAA games on Nintendo systems anymore the way they do on MicroSony systems. So of course it is gonna sell less. They for some reason think Nintendo owners should buy inferior (and sometime downright bad) versions of games simply because the dev studio didn't feel like putting in the effort that they did on the MicroSony version.

2) Because this has been going on since the Wii, many Nintendo gamers now simply don't expect to get the latest big sports games or the latest AAA action games and so they've gotten used to not buying them. But again, the third parties aren't bringing full effort versions of these games anyways so we really don't even know how these games would do on a Nintendo system these days. Big third party games are released on Nintendo systems usually not at all, but when they are they are either years late, bad low effort versions, or bad low effort versions that are also released late.

3) Wasn't there a survey recently that found 40% or something of Switch owners have a PS4 or XBO? If 3rd party releases a multi-plat game on Switch those people are probably going to buy the PS/Box version of the game because it has better graphics and performance, it probably came out before the Switch version, and the devs put in more effort to the PS/Box version so the game is probably objectively better simply due to more effort being made on the other versions. Switch and PX/Box are good complements for multi-system owning households and it makes sense given those things that Switch would get fewer sales. Solution to minimize this though is to make full effort Switch games and no crap low effort ports and release it on Switch at the same time. It's not gonna sell as much on Switch but it'll do a lot better than how 3rd party games have been doing with their normal don't release or low effort late release strategy.

4) This goes back a little bit to number two, but because third parties stop putting in the effort when Nintendo decided to stop competing on raw graphical specs 14 years ago, the player bases and their interests have settled out into the PS/Box camp and the Nintendo camp. This was done by the third parties though, not done to them by Nintendo or Nintendo players. They created a market in which their fans mostly buy PS/Box and people who don't care as much about a lineup heavy in sports games and action games go with Nintendo. They can certainly still sell to Nintendo gamers and bring back that audience to Nintendo gamers by actually making those games at full effort and releasing on time on Nintendo systems.

It's not like Nintendo owners don't want to play sports games and action games, which make up the meat of the popular PS/Box games, they just don't want shit version of them that come out years late. Nintendo having a bunch of mega sellers on the Switch doesn't mean third parties can't have a bunch of multi-million selling games on the Switch.