So Is This What We Wanted?
One month into its life cycle, the Nintendo Switch is absolutely what I expected it to be. The console already feels like the most competent dedicated handheld gaming hardware ever made. It already has an all-time great Nintendo game, and it looks to have at least one more on the way this year. But it’s also severely lacking in tangible third-party support, and it doesn’t do basically anything other than play games. For longtime Nintendo fans, everything aside from the hardware problems — which have doubtless been received as nasty little surprises for some owners — should have been completely expected.
But there is a perceptible gap between expectations and desires, and Nintendo has not fully bridged it. Just because you expect Electronic Arts and Capcom to have no plans to bring Mass Effect: Andromeda or Resident Evil 7, respectively, to the Switch doesn’t mean you should be happy with that situation. Looking further out, the chances of major third-party holiday releases like Red Dead Redemption 2 appear to have almost no chance at all of finding their way to Nintendo’s console.
What this means is that, if you’re a hardcore Nintendo fan who is content with quirky, exciting hardware that exists almost exclusively as a means to play Nintendo’s latest and greatest games, then the Switch looks like it’s exactly what you want it to be after month one. For everyone else, spending $300 on a console that has no multimedia features and scant few big guns from third parties is kind of crazy, even if Breath of the Wild turns out to be 2017’s best game.
If — and this is a big if — sales keep up at anything close to their current breakneck pace that has caused Nintendo to double production, however, major third-party support will almost certainly arrive eventually. So the Switch may one day grow into the console every gamer would like it to be, but it isn’t nearly there yet in April 2017.
