Famitsu Sales: Week 33, 2020 (Aug 10 - Aug 16)

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Here is the situation with Japanese third party developers: They take a really long time to make games.  Japanese dev time seems to be a lot slower than Western dev time.  Even back in 2017 it was obvious that Switch wasn't a dud like the Wii U, and it was also going to be the only handheld system available going forward.  These facts alone meant that the Switch was going to get a lot of third party support.  But we are only now, in 2020, we are getting a good amount of Switch third party games.

Basically it takes about 3 years on average for Japanese devs to make a game.  These are the types of third party games we get based on 2017 expectations, which were "Switch will be successful, but not record breaking".  Now in 2020 we can look at sales and see that Switch is breaking records.  At the very least Animal Crossing is a record breaking game, and Switch may end up breaking other sales records as well (it is cleary selling well enough to at least be competitive with the best selling systems ever).  This is the sort of year that makes Japanese devs that they need to seriously up support for the Switch.  But since there is a 3 year delay, we probably won't be seeing the effects of this until 2023.

Basically the Japanese third party support we should expect this year is for a moderately successful system, but we'll still need to wait a few years to see third party games of the calibur for a highly successful system.