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.
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Coverage of the Nintendo Switch console "launch" is available at Ars Technica, Tom's Hardware, Anandtech.
Nintendo Switch uses a USB Type-C cable for charging, and has a battery life ranging from 2.5 to 6.5 hours, comparable to (but less than) the latest version of the Nintendo 3DS XL. It can be played in Console, Handheld, and Tabletop modes. The handheld has a 6.2" 720p screen but the docked console supports 1080p60 gaming.
The Switch has 32 GB of internal storage, some of which is used for the operating system. It has a "game card slot" for games released on some form of proprietary physical flash media, but also comes with a standard microSD slot for expandable storage.
Nintendo will offer a free trial of a paid online gameplay service for the Switch (similar to Xbox Live Gold or PlayStation Plus) until sometime in Autumn.
The system will be released on March 3, 2017 for $299.
Here are some of the games.
Previously: "Nintendo Switch" Coming in March 2017
Will Third-Party Developers Support Nintendo's Switch?
Nintendo says that some Nintendo Switch consoles were stolen in an isolated incident that led to the termination of a distributor's employees and possibly criminal charges:
On Wednesday, a video surfaced of a Nintendo Switch in use, which gave us a good look at the device's software and how its menus work. Nintendo claims that the device in question had been stolen from a distributor.
The maker of the video had claimed that the Switch was a preorder that had shipped early, but walked those statements back. In a statement made to IGN, Nintendo said that the device and others had been stolen by the employee of a US distributor, and the one in the video had been resold.
Earlier this week, individuals claimed to prematurely purchase a small number of Nintendo Switch systems from an unspecified retailer. Nintendo has determined these units were stolen in an isolated incident by employees of a U.S. distributor, with one system being illegally resold. The individuals involved have been identified, terminated from their place of employment and are under investigation by local law enforcement authorities on criminal charges.
Previously: "Nintendo Switch" Coming in March 2017
Will Third-Party Developers Support Nintendo's Switch?
Nintendo Switch Available on March 3rd for $299
Nintendo takes a gamble with record-setting Switch production plans
The Nintendo Switch has been an unqualified success so far, with Nintendo recently promising increased holiday season production to meet demand and expectations of over 16 million total sales by the end of March 2018. Reporting now suggests the company is expecting that sales pace to increase markedly in the coming year, though, and another associated production increase would come with both a fair amount of potential and risk for the company.
The production news comes from The Wall Street Journal, which cites "people with direct knowledge of the matter" in reporting that Nintendo plans to make 25 to 30 million Switch units in the coming fiscal year (which starts in April 2018). That's a major increase from the 13 million produced for the current fiscal year, which itself was a sizable increase from the company's initial plans to make just 8 million units for the console's first full year on shelves. WSJ's sources say those production numbers could go up even higher if coming holiday season sales are strong.
Nintendo exec: Failed Wii U is responsible for Switch's success
The success of the company's latest gaming console, the Nintendo Switch, is the result of lessons taken from the failed Wii U, according to Reggie Fils-Aimé, the president of Nintendo America.
[...] The console also didn't have a consistent flow of new games supporting the system. "We've addressed that with the Nintendo Switch -- having a steady pace of new launches is critical," he said. The Switch includes games like "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild," "Super Mario Odyssey" and "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe."
Another issue with the Wii U was that it didn't have "strong support" from Nintendo's third-party partners, Fils-Aimé said. "Whether it's the big companies like Electronic Arts, or whether it's the smaller independent developer, we need those companies to create content to support us. We have that now with Nintendo Switch," he said.
Previously: Will Third-Party Developers Support Nintendo's Switch?
Nintendo Switch Available on March 3rd for $299
Nintendo Switch Stolen by Distributor's Employees Ahead of Launch, Details Leaked
The Ghost in Nintendo's Switch - Game Unlocks on the Date of Satoru Iwata's Death
(Score: 2) by n1 on Saturday January 07 2017, @10:17PM
Will Nintendo make it a viable platform to develop for? The blame for little third-party titles on Nintendo consoles for decades now is entirely a situation they created by making it difficult and expensive to develop for their systems.
This isn't always bad, Nintendo demands all games released on their platform go through their QA process, which is something most developers don't seem to bother with at all if they can avoid it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:38AM
Third party developers blame Nintendo because people prefer to buy first party masterpieces instead of third party turds. Sure, it's Nintendo's fault for creating some of the best games on history. If you don't have what it takes to create a masterpiece xbox or playstation is your platform of choice. If you are just a hobby crap programmer head to Android. There's not place for you on a real gaming system. Good quality third party games always sell greatly on Nintendo's platforms. Take the case of Shantae games, for example.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday January 18 2017, @02:28PM
For a hobbyist game developer attempting to become a professional, on what basis should one choose a platform?
Android devices in wide use tend to rely on a touch screen and accelerometer for input. Positional input from a touch screen works for some genres, such as point and click adventure games, RTS, and shmups, but not all. In particular it doesn't work well for platformers, as I discovered when I downloaded the free version of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure from Google Play Store, tried it, and found myself missing the on-screen buttons more often than not until I paired a physical keyboard. This is because the player cannot feel the edges of virtual buttons in order to keep his thumbs centered. How many people actually buy a clip-on gamepad?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday January 07 2017, @10:49PM
Tegra chip instead of the x86 used by PS4/Xbox, but not an Android device as far as we know. Need to develop games to meet the hybrid console/tablet nature of the system. Bethesda a "committed developer", but fake The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim footage. Fake footage for NBA 2K17, no actual plans for titles from Take Two Interactive. Completely uncertain sales outlook (although I think it might be successful compared to Wii U).
Nintendo has to take risks just to survive while Sony and Microsoft coast with their systems.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:32AM
Sure, to "survive" :-)
I think you should take a look at Christmas sales, or just browse to the list of most successful games in history, and you will have an inmense surprise. If someone's going to be culled soon that's the Sony portable console division, and maybe next it's going to be the xbox one.
While Sony and Microsoft fight each other Nintendo laughts surrounded by enough money to buy Sony or Microsoft gaming divisions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:41AM
Not having x86 (x64 in fact) is a feature. And an important one.
I always find interesting that people complain about CPU ISAs when nearly nobody except some of the highest paid employees at AAA studios can even read an assembler source file.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by archfeld on Saturday January 07 2017, @11:25PM
Sigh another proprietary platform that requires another complete coding, and won't play friendly with the rest of the world online, just what we need....
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:34AM
Same case as Linux kernel reason to use C, but in hardware, so people like you don't crap on their players. Fair enough.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tekk on Sunday January 08 2017, @04:04AM
The Switch has an absolutely massive advantage that Nintendo hasn't had since the SNES: It's not incredibly weird to develop for. Thinking about it, every single Nintendo system has had at least one major quirk. The WiiU had that gamepad which not even Nintendo knew what to do with (how many 1st party games used the pad display as anything more than a map or an inventory system? As far as I know, maybe.......3?) The Wii had the motion controls which never really worked well; the games that ran on that ran well despite the control scheme, except a handful of titles (again, maybe 3 that I can think of). The GameCube was their most normal, except it a third of the storage capacity of any console of its generation that wasn't the Dreamcast, which was discontinued before the GC even launched. The N64? Totally serviceable, except oh wait, you have less than a tenth the storage capacity of any of the competing systems.
The Switch? It's an ARM system running an NVidia GPU. It has its own weirdness, but that weirdness is "Oh cool, we suddenly got way more processing power" once the user plugs it into the dock. Aside from that the controllers are fine, the system itself seems fine, the only iffy part is that they've moved to cartridges, but with the price of flash memory as it is, unless Nintendo charges them out the ass for the physical media they aren't going to lose any storage space (anyone know if PS4 and XBOne support BDXL? That might give an advantage temporarily, but I figure it won't last too long,) and gain a hell of a lot of read speed. Could actually be a nice platform to develop for.
(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 :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday January 08 2017, @01:03PM
I think the most amazing part of the story is thanks to the magic of narrowcasting this is the first I've heard of the new nintendo tablet.
My son games some also, and he had not heard of it either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:32PM
News of the system will start to appear everywhere in a few days.