IcaroRibeiro said:
It's neither. It's laziness and lack of vision and trust about Switch-only owners. KH3 is another story but porting a collection of a bunch of PS2/PSP/3DS games is a breeze and wold sell consistently better than a cloud version Square is likely to think the only people really interested in KH are playing on PlayStation. Seems a common misconception studios have that Switch gamers only play Nintendo games but I digress |
That would make sense... if they didn't put the games on Xbox, a market with literally 0 KH tradition. On contrast, KH is fairly popular among Nintendo fans. CoM, Days and DDD all sold very well on their respective platforms. Pretty much as good as BbS did on the PSP. MoM sold better on Switch than on PS4 in Japan and I don't think the story is much different on the west.
There's certainly a market for the series on the Switch. And Square Enix knows it. That's why they are releasing the entire franchise on the console. That's 7 games in total and a bunch of movies/cutscenes. How do we make this in the easiest and most profitable way?
A normal release? Nah, too much work and money. Not only you have to port the games, you have to put them in (somewhat expensive) game carts and distribute them to the stores. And considering that 1.5 + 2.5 is a 50GB game... we either spend more effort into reducing that size or we go for a ridiculously expensive cart. No way.
A digital only release? Hmm, we are getting somewhere now. No distribution, no need to worry about expensive carts. Yeah, that's something. But... can we do it even cheaper...?
Oh, yes we can.
A cloud version. We save on porting all those 7 games entirely (all of them need optimization and tweaks, even 1.5 + 2.5 and DDD), which would be quite a bit of money even if 5 of them are based on old games. And best of all: we can charge ridiculous prices that will be almost entirely pure benefits thanks to not developing shit. They only thing we have to spend money on are the servers, which will be cheap and crappy, delivering even worse performance than the PS3 version of the collection. Even if it somehow bombs due to negative reception, we can almost certainly guarantee we don't lose any money or even win some. It's perfect.
In the end I think it's a combination of everything we all said. It's incompetence, is lazyness, is greed... All in all, KH on Switch is the result of every single bad thing a videogame company could do.
But I'm getting carried away. This is about Hogwart's Legacy. A very ambitious AAA open world game that unlike certain HD collection will have an actual native Switch version. That we should celebrate (as long as it ends up being a decent product).
