As the Switch is breaking sales numbers left and right selling 62M in only 3 years and is on pace to have the greatest selling console year of all time this year. It's beginning to boggle my mind why certain 3rd Party Games/Publishers STILL aren't willing to even test the waters with the Switch with their major franchises. For example, why the hell isn't any sort of COD game on the Switch when it was on the Wii/DS/ and the dead Wii U and even mobile, and from what I heard were profitable. Why is Rockstar not even testing the waters with a 360 port of GTA 5 on the Switch despite the Switch outselling the Xbox One and likely to pass the PS4. Also publishers like EA for years was refusing to support the Switch despite its success and even now their support is limited.

At this point the Switch has pretty much disproved every excuse in the book for 3rd party publishers not even to TEST THE WATERS WITH 1 Game.

"Switch can't handle those games, and they're not worth the investment to port"

-Witcher 3 is on Switch, if the Switch could handle that it could handle just about anything. IK it does take a lot of time and money to downscale to Switch. However, a game like GTA 5 was on the 360, at least porting that to Switch would be so easy and affordable. Plus COD is on Mobile and Activision was WILLING to take a PS3 level game to make it work on the DS, equivalent to trying to make a PS3 game to work on the PS1. Plus it's been proven that despite the time & money it takes to port a AAA game on Switch it's still very profitable. 2016 Doom, Wolfenstein  despite being a year old and being a high end game graphically was profitable enough for Bethesda to be encouraged to port an even more demanding Doom Eternal on Switch and support the Switch fully. The Witcher 3 nearly sold 1M on Switch in only 2 months despite being years old. Even Rockstar's LA NOIRE according to VGchartz sold MORE than the Xbox One Version despite being on a much smaller install base at the time of its release. More 3rd Party games are being released on the Switch because they see the money these other developers are making.

"Switch isn't a good micro-transaction system"

-This argument seems to be coming up over and over as people attempt to find excuses for why certain publishers aren't bringing their games on Switch. However, this is an argument that has zero evidence behind it. I guess people use this excuse because of how bad the Switch's online service is and automatically assume people on Switch don't play or spend on online games. However there is no evidence to validate this point. If anything there's more of evidence that micro-transactions are doing well on the Switch and are more likely to do well on the Switch. Fortnite has done extremely successful on the Switch, so successful that EVEN hesitant publishers like EA is willing to bring Apex on to the Switch. Blizzard is encouraged to release Overwatch 2 on the Switch due to its success. Microtransaction focused games like the Switch like NBA2k is doing well enough to bring in NBA2k21 as well. Plus if you think about it, Switch is an already pricey system overall, millions are willing to pay 60$ for games years old and Switch games rarely get discounts and little to no free games like Xbox or Playstation gives out sometimes. This is showing that many Switch owners have a pretty big disposable income which would make it more likely for micro transactions to be purchased on Switch. Plus, Rockstar/Activision haven't even ATTEMPTED to test the waters, they can't assume something that they haven't even attempted, let alone have any evidence for it.

The Switch is going to blow past 100M and yet these developers still aren't porting their games over despite the Switch debunking their concerns. At this point it's making me believe they have some sort of resentment towards Nintendo for their anti-third party behaviors in the past. It could have started with the NES.

-Nintendo saved gaming with the NES, pretty much becoming the only hot gaming system on the market at the time and of course 3rd Party Developers wanted to take advantage of that and begin releasing their games on the NES. However, Nintendo always treated them like shit through multiple ways, I assume the reason is that Nintendo would rather making more profit having THEIR games sell rather than someone else's, so they threw a lot of 3rd parties under the bus. Nintendo knowing how powerful pretty much made 3rd party developers sign an exclusivity contract that states that if a 3rd party publisher wants to make a game on the NES, it could only be on the NES and they weren't allowed to port to any other system. Nintendo was doing this ILLEGAL monopoly business practice for several years before getting caught. While 3rd Party developers hated this, the NES was the only hot system in the market right now with no other game platform like the Master System or PC doing anywhere near as successful as the NES, so 3rd Party developers were forced to agree to their strict policy. 3rd Party Developers were also forced to purchase cartridges directly from Nintendo at hefty prices with Nintendo sometimes knowingly restricting shipments for 3rd party games in favor of porducing their own games, making 3rd parties furious. Nintendo also imposed a 5 game per year limit on developers. This already started a rift between 3rd parties and Nintendo.

-Onto the SNES, while Nintendo did lighten down on their policies since it was caught being illegal. They were still heavily restrictive, especially when it came to M-Rated games where Mortal Kombat was forced to censor blood to keep a family friendly image, which vastly hurt the sales of the SNES port of the game. Nintendo was still in control when it came to selling cartridges and having higher licensing fees, making Nintendo difficult to work with.

-Onto the N64 Nintendo again became arrogant by deciding to use cartridges instead of CD-ROM, as Nintendo was likely hoping that 3rd parties would give in and continue to purchase cartridges from them. However, once Sony came in with an easier to develop for system, many 3rd parties left Nintendo. While Sony was treating 3rd Parties with respect by providing tools & resources while attempting to make a system that's tailor-suited for them, Nintendo was spitting in the face of them treating their games like shit.(It's good to note during this gen Nintendo nearly put Rockstar North out of business by canceling an exclusive game that was in development hell)

-In the Gamecube era, while Sony & Microsoft again were putting all their efforts to make sure everyone was on board. Nintendo completely took the isolation approach and even gave 3rd parties a reason to not make games for the Gamecube by imposing higher licensing fees than its competitors while also using a small-dvd that made it difficult for 3rd parties to fit their AAA games. Nintendo in fact was against multi-platform games, with Miyamoto stating that the popularity of Multi-plats "wouldn't give anyone a reason to buy one system over another" with him also stating "they aren't contributing much in unique hardware experiences". While this is all speculation, I believe Nintendo behind the scenes downright refused to allow games like GTA SA onto the Gamecube, since Nintendo didn't want to accept the fact that the industry was shifting more towards violent and dark 3rd party games with consoles that were lacking personality. Also, Nintendo was probably worried that Multi-plats may threaten the sales of their 1st party games, which is a big stream of their revenue. According the a Nintendo of America executive, he heard a Nintendo of Japan executive say "Consumers don't want fun anymore, they just want to kill people in HD" which shows Nintendo likely had a difficult time fathoming the fact that violent multiplatform games were outshining their games.

-And with the Wii/Wii U, it's pretty obvious Nintendo stopped giving any little fucks they had for 3rd parties and went their own direction, and unlike Sony/Microsoft, they were unwilling to throw their money around to get them on board either. And in a way I feel like 3rd Party developers over the years began to grow resent towards Nintendo for treating them like hot garbage compared to Sony/Microsoft.

This is my theory.

When your the big dog, you tick off the little guys trying to get scraps. Nintendo made mistakes years ago. If those mistakes are the reason companies don't want to sell 1-3 million copies of a port for Switch, that's their loss. It doesn't make good business sense, but that's capitalism and their choice.

I suspect the same thing that happened to Nintendo then is going to happen to Apple soon. Their 30% cut stance, along with banning Xcloud and (I think?) Stadia... They've just declared war on the whole world. Will be interesting to watch over the next couple of years to see what happens!

I can't really imagine why third parties are still holding out, though obviously 2020 has been the best year yet for third parties bringing big ports over with like Borderlands, Bioshock, Xcom, outer worlds, and crysis already off the top of my head and probably a few more old popular and/or AAA games still to come this year.

But still you'd think by now Switch would be inundated with AAA third party ports both from last gen and some from this gen.

It's obviously not cuz of a perceived lack of sales because even many years old ports of AAA games are selling over a million copies with a higher price than on other systems. If third parties actually starting bringing new AAA games to Switch built for the Switch we'd have a library full of 5+ million selling third party games no doubt.

Lmao. Xcloud and Stadia have a bigger chance of flopping into oblivion than Apple bending to some gaming rules lol. This won’t effect Apple at all.

As for Nintendo, more or less the same thing. It has reached a point where some third party publishers don’t care for Nintendo. And Nintendo isn’t phased by that either. Switch is selling gangbusters on top of their on own software support. 

Possibly, but I'm sure there are way more that just don't see the pay off vs doing something else more so in their wheelhouse. Heck I'd bet there's companies who just don't want their game to be seen by some, looking worse on Switch and keeping it off there to avoid negative public reception. Kinda like seeing Crysis Remastered sort of, with the backlash as to why it doesn't look good enough for the type of game it is.

"Build it and they will come", doesn't automatically mean everyone will show up. Switch has seen a reasonably worthy response though.

I'm sure some companies don't like doing business with Nintendo. But, it's hard to imagine they hate Nintendo more than they love money, and would just not bring games over based purely out of spite.

Abso-tooti-lutely some of the big third parties and the indies hold strong grudges or general feelings of resentment towards Nintendo.

A common theme is being treated very kindly and warmly by one representative for a few years, after which this person moves on to a new position or otherwise disappears, and the new contact you have access to treats you like a complete stranger, and as if you're generally of lowest possible priority.

For people like Ubisoft, EA, ActivisionBlizzard, and the other big boys, I'd suspect a key ingredient for resentment arriving in the form of a complete unwillingness on Nintendo's behalf to offer these behemoth companies any special treatment at all.
They're likely being asked to pay the same royalty percentage, the same server maintenance fees, and and the same cartridge manufacturing prices as the indies and smaller publishers like say Curve Digital or Team 17.
On top of that, Nintendo doesn't seem to allow publishers to demand that players create user profiles with them, AND Nintendo's ideas about microtransactions and DLC are visibly (and thankfully) conservative and counterintuitive to finding innovative ways of squeezing players for money.

What I do know is that companies often don’t exactly make the smartest decisions. They put stuff on Nintendo systems that don’t fit and they keep stuff off Nintendo systems that do. For example, if Activision doesn’t port Crash 4 to Switch it would be monumentally dumb. Or Capcom, that actually did port over everyone and their mother to WiiU and 3DS, yet with Switch they ‘aren’t so sure’.

"Switch can't handle those games, and they're not worth the investment to port"

I think a lot of people over simplify this reality. Witcher 3 had a team porting it for a year. It's not to say that it's not worth the investment but if we were to take GTA for example, a huge game. Porting that over, even if just the 360 version would take notable time. Rockstar could instead invest that in new GTA online content, which immediately serves their audience and has a much quicker return on investment. Developers are always working on new things including prototyping their next big thing (many times over), ports are kind of at the back of their mind once they've hit their target platforms.

Games like Call of Duty are pumped out like machines. It completely understandable how they may be apprehensive about convoluting the dev cycle with a Switch inclusion. All that effort for 1m sales when they could make that same money back in DLC for main platforms or if the developer is serious about the experience on their game, they could use that time to ensure the quality of the main versions and avoid delays. For things like Call of Duty mobile, these are decade long investments which make for very underwhelming console experiences. I would understand if they were porting the yearly COD to mobile, but mobile has its own platform specific game that will keep them going for a while.

And then there are developers who simply do not want to compromise their experience. Porting games to significantly weaker platforms is not fun. 

But the thing is, in capitalism, when confronted with two options of making profit, you don't just pick the number 1 way, you try for both. If there is MORE money to be made by doing a Switch version (on top of DLCs and whatnot), then get another studio that does the port outside your company and you are still getting more money than you would have had. Maximizing profits should be what capitalistic companies are all about. This would also help smaller porting studios out with a big contract and get healthier position the future to make original games themselves. And the consumer gets their game. Win win win for everyone.