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Will Third-Party Developers Support Nintendo's Switch?

Accepted submission by Arthur T Knackerbracket at 2017-01-04 09:33:30
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FeedSource: [ArsTechnica]

Time: 2017-01-03 21:55:36 UTC

Original URL: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/will-third-parties-developers-support-nintendos-switch/ [arstechnica.com] using UTF-8 encoding.

Title: Will third-party developers support Nintendo's Switch?

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Will third-party developers support Nintendo's Switch?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [arstechnica.com]:

The most interesting tidbit comes from Laura Kate Dale, who's come through with a number of reliable Nintendo Switch leaks [arstechnica.com] in the recent past. Dale's recent tweets [twitter.com] 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.

Ubisoft has been one of the biggest proponents of the Switch, with the company's EMEA director, Alain Corre, telling Japanese magazine Famitsu in November [nintendoeverything.com] that Ubisoft has "big expectations" and was planning "a wide variety of software" for the system. Ubisoft has been a big backer of recent Nintendo systems, too; the inventive Rabbids series and best-selling Just Dance both got their start on the Wii, after all.

That said, a year-long exclusivity deal for a game as anticipated as Beyond Good & Evil 2 would be a major coup for Nintendo's new system. The innovative action adventure Beyond Good & Evil  became a cult classic [arstechnica.com] in the years since its low-key 2003 release, and an official sequel has been at a low vaporware boil since 2008 [arstechnica.com]. With actual teaser art [polygon.com] following a renewed commitment to that sequel during this year's E3 [gamespot.com], an exclusivity deal would bring instant additional interest to the Switch from a certain segment of the gaming world.

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 [stevivor.com], 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."

Nintendo, for its part, highlighted third-party titles like NBA2K and Skyrim in its Nintendo Switch announcement trailer in October [arstechnica.com]. The company also posted a massive list of third-party partners [businesswire.com] for the system alongside that announcement. But many of those partners are actually middleware technology makers, and similar (if smaller) lists were rolled out for the launch of the Wii [gonintendo.com] and Wii U [hobbyconsolas.com]. Ultimately, both of those consoles ran into trouble maintaining outside support, so whether developers stick around this time could be key to Nintendo's success going forward.


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