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As we get closer and closer to Nintendo's January 12 announcement of additional Nintendo Switch details—and an expected March launch for the hybrid portable/home console—we're starting to get more information on what kind of support the system might get from third-party developers.
The most interesting tidbit comes from Laura Kate Dale, who's come through with a number of reliable Nintendo Switch leaks in the recent past. Dale's recent tweets suggest Ubisoft's long-anticipated Beyond Good & Evil 2 will reportedly be "exclusive to Switch for 12 months," and the game will come to Xbox One, PS4, and PC only after that time. That information should be confirmed at Nintendo's January reveal, according to Dale.
[...] Unfortunately for Nintendo, not every developer is as interested in bringing big-name titles to the Switch. In an interview with Oceanic gaming site Stevivor, Bioware's Michael Gamble said he had no plans to bring the upcoming Mass Effect Andromeda to the Switch at this point. However, Gamble did leave some wiggle room: "if the Switch launches and everyone's just yammering for Mass Effect, who knows. We never want to close doors like that."
The level of high-quality support that the Switch receives from third-party developers could be a make-or-break question for the console. Will the upcoming Nintendo Switch be a Wii U-style abandoned island, with no one but Nintendo to make compatible games? Will it be a Wii-style repository of third-party shovelware that lacks competent ports of the big-budget games made for competing consoles? Or will it be a return to the SNES era, the last time a Nintendo home console was unquestionably one of the primary destinations for major games from most third-party publishers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:56AM
A former SNES developer here: The SNES was an incredibly weird super underpowered system to work with. Just compare it's specs with the Sega Megadrive and think about the 68k assembler background everyone had in 1990. I propose you get one of the super easy SDKs available out there and try to put a few sprites on screen, and you will have an interesting surprise. For many things even the 8 bit PC Engine CPU was so much more powerful. Don't even dare to compare that with the Sega Megadrive / Amiga / Atari ST / etc.
The difference between then and now is whining lazy millenials and lazy old Java lovers too old to learn new tricks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @11:25PM
As I remember the SNES had a 16 bit successor to the 6502 or 6510 in it.
What particular issues did it have that 68k based systems helped avoid?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday January 18 2017, @02:12PM
The last time we hashed this out on NESdev BBS, the conclusion [nesdev.com] was that compared to the 68000 in the Genesis and Macintosh, the 65816 in the Super NES and Apple IIGS has no 32 bit addition (only 16 bit), no multiplication and division instructions (though the Super NES memory controller provides an 8-bit memory-mapped multiplier and divider), and a segmented architecture like the 8086 but more register-starved. But the difference isn't as great as the 15:7 ratio (7.67 MHZ 68000 vs. 3.58 MHZ 65816) would initially suggest because the like the Z80, the 68000 spends a lot of cycles on microcoded internal operation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @12:29AM
And gives a new site to visit :)