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

[DonFerrari]

oniyide said:
Honest question. Why do people care so much? It's not like you're missing much. Respawn is the only devs from that side that seem to kinda know how to make decent games anyway. What games from EA would you want?

Pretty much.

Mnementh said:

DonFerrari said:

I totally agree that they are either unable to understand how to profit (on their expectations) on Nintendo HW or that they understand what they need and don't want to do that (that it could lead to less total profit/investment). That isn't a defense of EA or their practices, but to deny that there isn't much room for 3rd party compared to 1st parties on Switch is also undeniable (and not a problem for me, even on PS4 I buy much more 1st party than 3rd party even though there is like 100x more titles from 3rd parties and most of the top sellers there aren't Sony).

And yes I do think most Nintendo titles are better than most 3rd party games.

This is still a misrepresentation. 3rd-parties as a whole have a lower share on Nintendo platforms, because

1. best-selling 3rd-party titles do not release on Nintendo-platforms, including Switch
2. Nintendo titles do better than Sony/MS-titles

But that doesn't mean much in the bigger picture. Because for a game dev the question is: will my game sell on Switch. And for most games that released on Switch and also on other platforms the answer is: yes, it sells and often sells better than on other platforms. For that answer it doesn't matter that a non-existing RDR doesn't sell on Switch, or that a Mario Kart sells 20 million (in the same way as the same dev doesn't care that on PS4 RDR2 sells 20 million). I mean, the argument could easily be: most game devs have no space on PS4, as most of it's game sales are dedicated to Call of Duty, GTA and Red Dead Redemption. But in actuality that doesn't matter so much, except you try to directly compete with these titles.

And well, on Switch even titles that directly compete with Mario Kart do pretty well. For instance Crash Team Racing did not worse on Switch than on Xbox One, despite Xbox not having Mario Kart. Team Sonic Racing apparently sold similar on Switch and PS4, but again PS4 has no Mario Kart.

So the existance of great selling Nintendo titles is actually not of importance, important is how much your game sells. That can be answered differently for different games, but I am pretty sure of EA's catalogue, the Sims would do pretty well on Switch. Probably also Dragon Age and Mass Effect, but I am pretty sure about the Sims. FIFA and Battlefield on the other hand probably will not find as much customers on Switch.

You are basically using absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

The pubs release what they believe will make good profit (thus why you have somewhat split number of titles that sell better versus PS4 and vice-versa), but the games that sell 20M on PS4 wouldn't be release on Switch and if they were they wouldn't probably cross 5M.

The list of releases on Switch barely have any 3rd party crossing 2M.