Nintendo wants third-parties, but we’ll see
Nintendo has come out of the gate of console announcements boasting a wealth of third-party (developers/publishers not owned by console manufacturers) support for as long as anyone else, but they’re the only company of the big three that hasn’t been able to maintain their grasp in the past 10 years. Part of this is because the casual audience that bought the Wii in 2006 didn’t stick around long to buy more games, but it’s also because the company’s last two consoles have been dramatically underpowered and incompatible with ports from a PlayStation/Xbox. This means that publishers have to design entirely different games around the unique aspects of the console, which stops being fiscally viable when more players are using the competition.
During the console’s unveiling video, the big star was a conceptual version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim running on a Switch. Skyrim represents the future that Nintendo wants for the console – a machine that plays the newest games from more than just Nintendo – but they still face familiar challenges that could severely diminish third-party support. The biggest of which is easily the power level of the Switch, which is approximated somewhere around a PS3 or Xbox 360. We dive deeper into the minutia of Nintendo and third-parties in a separate story, for those interested.
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