I find those numbers a little suspicious. The volume of total retail software sold on Switch is 994 million—around. Approximately 400.52 million of those are developed by Nintendo. And I just don’t buy that Xbox Series X/S and PS5 are outselling Switch by that much in third party sales. Particularly when third party sales have only increased in volume since the Switch launch.

I’d like to see a breakdowns of their numbers to see how they managed to get such wild looking numbers. Are they sampling in specific markets? Only specific companies that might not have that much software on the Switch? What’s going on here?

—Anyway, onto the main topic—

Either way, I’d guess the likely reason for GTA 5 not being on Switch probably has to do with a number of factors: and I doubt Microsoft’s suspicious (probably incorrect) statistics have anything to do with it. There are a number of factors:

While I’m not too familiar with GTA5, I’m guessing that a port job would be much more difficult than LA Noire or that GTA trilogy collection (you know, the one with missing content). Second, their analysis probably told them Switch isn’t one of their major opportunities. Third, Nintendo and Rockstar may still have bad working relations dating to the nasty Dream Team breakup on the N64. Fourth, Take 2 has been a bit of a flop on Switch compared to other third parties—their Switch ports are trash… the buggiest games I’ve come across on the console, by far.

Why Take 2 sucks so much on Switch is a mystery to me. So, even if they did port GTA5 to Switch, there seems to be a high chance it wouldn’t be any good.

I hate to be negative on them, because I’m generally a fan of their games on other platforms. But, I tried to like them on Switch… Because WWE 2K18, Civ 6, and GTA Remaster trilogy are broken levels of buggy. In fact, I’d say Civ 6 on Switch was probably my worst experience on the console.

Has anyone played a game by Take 2 on Switch that wasn’t kind of broken? Something that doesn’t feel like they released it halfway through Beta?

It's hard to say the definitive reason why GTA 5 isn't on Switch. We have to remember though that the people behind the decision to release GTA 5 or not likely aren't as logical or have as much knowledge regarding the Switch. For the most part the people in Take-Two & Rockstar are most likely solely focus on PS & Xbox and always disregarded Nintendo as a legit console maker for their 3rd party games with most of Rockstar's games skipping out on Nintendo platforms even when successful.

For previous Nintendo consoles, likely the biggest reason why Rockstar always skipped out is likely due to hardware limitations, the lower sales numbers they either seen for themselves or by other developers on Nintendo platforms, and the image surrounding Nintendo as being the more family-friendly console that appeals to gamers who don't care play mature games on an underpowered Nintendo console. The Gamecube dealt with not only suffering with hardware limitations with small discs for GTA to fit, but also sold poorly and had a very bad childish image at the time for Rockstar to take seriously and think it could sell well, same goes for the Wii & Wii U.

Even though the Switch has been breaking some of those previous norms we've seen with mature games on previous Nintendo platforms. With Nintendo receiving more mature games and showing pretty good results & the Switch being powerful enough to handle the 360 version of GTA 5. It's likely that Rockstar/Take Two still isn't seeing that opportunity there based on their previous history with Nintendo platforms. I'm surprised at the amount of people I see on the internet who firmly believe that "Switch can't handle GTA 5" even though that's false since it was made on systems less powerful than the Switch, and I wouldn't be surprised if Rockstar/Take-Two employees think the same thing because they may have forgotten that the 360 version of GTA5 exists and that the Switch is more powerful. And like other people said they might be scared to deal with Nintendo's poor online service since GTA Online is Rockstar's biggest priority with GTA rn. And maybe they might not have enough faith GTA 5 will do well on Switch despite the high install base cause its possible they might still have a stigma towards Nintendo of being a platform that doesn't care about mature games. While yes they did release GTA Trilogy on Switch its likely a far lower-budget game that Rockstar would be willing to risk release and its a more story mode-oriented game that tends to do better on Switch.

A key example I could give that shows the stigma for developers in making mature games for a Nintendo platform is when Mortal Kombat 11 was about to release on Switch, I think I heard some story about a developer showing it off to Nintendo and asking "Are you sure you're ok with putting this mature game on Switch?" which is crazy to ask in 2019 when Nintendo long stopped restricting mature games on their platforms for 20+ years now, but a lot of these developers don't know how Nintendo platforms are like.

I'd still like to see GTA 5 come to Switch, but I feel like it's already getting too late for that at this point. The Switch is on the latter half of its lifecycle and GTA5 while still big, Rockstar will soon transition to GTA6. I feel like if GTA5 were to come to switch it would've happened by now.

The track record for GTA games on Nintendo consoles are not that great sales wise.
It seems like free money to me still.

Yes after looking into the fiscal year info from Sony and Nintendo I don't see how MS figures add up for 2021. My guess is that this figure is not actually for 2021 only but is in fact adding together lifetime 3rd party sales for PS4+PS5 vs XBO+XS vs Switch as of the end of 2021 (or FY 2021?).

The chart shows PlayStation selling over triple the 3rd party software of Nintendo but in 2021 it was actually around double not triple.

It's not on Switch because they're a bunch of idiots.

That makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the data by the way, that helps a lot (you didn’t have to do that, although I do appreciate it! I had a search for data and was less successful than you—although, I focused on trying to find Xbox). So basically from the time of the Switch inception until 2021 rather than just 2021. Switch was definitely first party heavy early on thanks to the killer apps. Good at firing up the hardware demand, but probably not the most positive for third parties to be going up against. But it also shows that perhaps the data was a little early on the Switch to be considering it completely unviable. But, I do think GTA5 has more hurdles for the Switch than other consoles.

This. When they released Chinatown Wars on the DS, its sales figures were absolutely pathetic. Then they put it on the PSP, and it quickly sold like gangbusters. They haven't really bothered with Nintendo's platforms since then.

Chinatown Wars didn't sell any better on the PSP than on the DS. The game managed just over a million copies on each of the two consoles.

Wikipedia suggests the PSP version sold worse

So did it sell more, about the same, or worse ?