While I know better than to take the usual big western publishers seriously—they're hedging, they're buried in preconceptions (supported by metrics) of what the Nintendo demographic is, some of them like Ubisoft were burnt by the risk they took on the Wii U, and they probably won't deliver much more than the all-ages portfolio previously filled by Lego, Disney, Skylanders, and Just Dance—this time around the chatter about Nintendo reaching out to third parties is actually a little unusual.
In previous generations, you would have people from Epic or Bethesda, when asked about ports of engines or games, come out and say directly that Nintendo wasn't even talking to them, that if Nintendo wanted them on board they needed to say so during the development of the console two or three years before launch and not after it was finalized in Japan. That's something we're
not hearing this time, perhaps as the result of an effort to reach Epic and Bethesda specifically (even if Skyrim is a very late port).
Sure, we're hearing a lot of the usual non-committal "we like the system but have nothing to announce"—but the closest thing we have to an indication of a communication breakdown, commonly reported if you've followed third-party relations all the way back to the GameCube, is Randy Pitchford saying Gearbox lost touch with them.
I am
not at all expecting three-platform releases as the new/returning AAA standard (and a useful benchmark for this may be "will the Switch get the next Assassin's Creed day one?"). But the tone seems different this time around, not from the token positivity, but from the lack of negativity or overt apathy.
I see Assassins Creed and CoD as the gate for Switch at this point because they're two of the biggest third party games that attracts both hardcore and casual crowds. If Switch can't even secure AC and CoD by this fall then yeah it'll pretty much be a Nintendo machine again. Hopefully the merits of having a portable CoD/AC experience that isn't extremely watered down like BLOPS
eclassified and Liberations on Vita is enough to convince Activision and Ubisoft, and I think if those two games sell well on Switch it might open up the gates for more third parties.
I expect we'll get
one simultaneous entry in the big third-party IPs; the question is whether we get two, or if we're returning to the Wii U situation where Black Flag bombed and Watch Dogs was quietly shoved under the rug a year late to get out of a contract nobody wanted.
One lesson from the Wii U, by the way, is that far worse than a lack of technical parity or a delayed release is a lack of content parity in the form of DLC. In many cases there was no reason to get a third-party port on Wii U not for performance reasons but because you wouldn't receive the same post-launch content support.
