At a recent investor meeting, Nintendo have explained their strategy for making third party titles more of a reality on their latest hardware.
Focusing on the ease of being able to port PC titles to their Switch console, according to a report by Venturebeat, Switch will be easier to write software for due to both the Unreal and Unity graphics engines working natively on the Tegra processor that the Switch will be using. Shigeru Miyamoto explained that a conscious decision was made to ensure developers could port games to Switch easily and adding “That ease of software development has also been felt by Nintendo’s internal developers,”
Shinya Takahashi reiterated this point “For our previous game platforms, creating our own development tools was a high priority for us,”
“However, since the start of Nintendo Switch development we have been aiming to realize an environment in which a variety of different third-party developers are able to easily develop compatible software, such as by making it compatible with Unreal and Unity as well as our own development tools. As a result, even companies with only a few developers have already started making games for Nintendo Switch.”
The launch line up is slowing growing before next month’s launch, with more Indie PC games heading to the platform, so it may be that we’ll see a few more smaller developers jump on board, too. Hopefully, with Unreal being so popular, larger developer teams might be persuaded to bolster the platform’s line up in its first year.
