Digital Foundry: Lots of devs at Gamescom said they aren't able to get Switch 2 dev kits. There are even weird exclusions for some big AAA developers

touchfuzzy said:
Yeah I doubt many developers of consequence are having trouble getting dev kits, especially AAA. I struggle to think of a single AAA publisher that doesn't have a Switch 2 game already released / announced to release soon.

Sure Joe Indie studio might be complaining but it's all here say and anecdotal.
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John and Oliver are, at present, mightily perturbed, sir.
 
I'm not sure why anyone was expecting every AAA studio to get Switch 2 dev kits. What would they do with them? That's a serious question: modern AAA games aren't going to run on the Switch 2 unless they're re-built from the ground up or ship with absolutely abysmal performance, like we're seeing with Elden Ring. They might rebuild some of their games, like we saw with Switch 1, but it'll take a while for platform to have the install necessary to justify that kind of investment.
 
Nintendo didn't provide alot of Development Kits to 3rd Party Developers because Nintendo feared Leaks before the official Showcase of the Nintendo Switch 2.

Nintendo isn't really a Fan of Leaks!
 
VGA-Games said:
Nintendo didn't provide alot of Development Kits to 3rd Party Developers because Nintendo feared Leaks before the official Showcase of the Nintendo Switch 2.

Nintendo isn't really a Fan of Leaks!
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uh... well... someone should have told them that we knew the full specs of that thing since 2021 then 🤣
 
Who are these big AAA devs that can't get kits? MS, Sega, Capcom, Konami, CDPR, Square Enix, 2K, Bandai Namco, Koei Tecmo, EA, etc all have kits. I have a hard time believing there are a number of AAA devs wanting to make Switch 2 games that Nintendo is refusing for the heck of it.
For indie devs, I could see that. A lot of them probably could just release their game on Switch 1 and have it work on Switch 2 via back compat. But then you can't make much use of the hardware.
 
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VGA-Games said:
This is probably one Reason why Nintendo was really careful with sending out Development Kits to 3rd Party Developers.

Nintendo wanted to prevent even more Leaks!
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well, then late 2024/early 2025 the rest of it completely leaked already. so I'd say at that point there was no real use for keeping anything secret anymore.
 
I think they prob want to avoid the WiiU situation after Wii's success, that had too many games at launch. They can wanna space them out.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo is essentially curating their line-up for this year and next.

The console has obviously been ready for over a year. Every title Nintendo has shown so far seems to have originally been a Switch 1 game.

Next month is Super Mario 40th anniversary, and without question there is going to be a build up to the next Super Mario Movie. On top of that, some kind of Mario Game to capitalize on their next billion dollar movie success story.

It all seems very deliberate the way they are spacing things out. Trying to maximize the profit and limelight of each game they release.

Feels like they are pushing everything cross-gen out first. Giving them some time to shine until the actual true Switch 2 games are delivered.

Is their goal one year? 2 years? I'm not sure, I think the next direct is going to be a good sign of how long we are actually going to have to wait for their original Switch 2 titles.

And in the meantime, they may be selfishly stalling certain devs from kits so their cross-gen titles aren't so strongly looked down upon.
 
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It's being handled poorly. It is very region dependent, so European devs are having a harder time than say... South American ones. They're also pretty adamant that they don't want the Switch 2 to immediately turn into a dumping ground for back catalog ports. Either way, Ninty's really playing this one close to the chest, however you wanna slice it.
 
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All the big AAA devs have dev kits.
Which western developer isn't getting a dev kit and should we care?, i think if we knew the names of these devs we would also understand why they are not a priority
 
VGA-Games said:
Nintendo didn't provide alot of Development Kits to 3rd Party Developers because Nintendo feared Leaks before the official Showcase of the Nintendo Switch 2.

Nintendo isn't really a Fan of Leaks
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Leaks of what?
Everybody knew it would be underpowered and overpriced even before it was announced and it has no unique hardware feature (the mouse was basically invented when dinosaurs roamed the planet), except maybe a LCD screen with less quality than the Switch 1, that I can understand they not wanting people to know.

It all screams bad management to me or not enough devkits and/or testkits ordered by incompetence of whoever was in charge of that.
 
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Bro, if I only had a Switch 2, never bought any other console not Nintendo these past years and i was waiting for those big third parties to deliver that I missed out on...... I'd be so pissed now.

At least we do get this though.

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I mean we know Square Enix got one, Capcom did, Altus / Sega did, NIS did so that's most of Japan taken care of. For the west CDPR got it, 2K did since they made the Civ 7 version.

Edit: also UbiSoft is making a camera version of Just Dance afaik?

Really curious what kind of AAA devs didn't get any but I doubt it's gigantic ones.
 
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Makes sense, I've been wondering for a while why so many companies didn't just port over popular PS4/XO games for the Switch 2 launch window given it was easy $$$.
 
Certinty said:
Makes sense, I've been wondering for a while why so many companies didn't just port over popular PS4/XO games for the Switch 2 launch window given it was easy $$$.
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I mean you just know Todd wants to re-re-release Skyrim on S2 and maybe Fallout 4! Wonder if Bethesda got enough kits.

Folks also should remember it's not like a studio needs one or two kits, they would need a bunch considering number of devs on these games.

Edit: Ans don't forget various port studios who mainly work on supporting port jobs (like Virtuous and others). They may not have gotten kits hence the lack of older AAA ports from PS4/XBO.
 
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I don't get how it can be so damn difficult to distribute dev kits. A very different APU than the console? They prepared a small batch and now it takes time to make them again?

Sounds like for a company that understands the logistics involved to ship >100M hardware in a generation, handling to what can only amount to hundreds of dev kits should be piss easy
 
Nintendo is absolutely terrified of fumbling the transition to Switch 2; that much was clear from their investor talk over multiple years leading up to release.

It seems that with this approach, they hedge their bets--ensuring that Switch 1 continues to receive software support during the transition (software that can automatically play better on Switch 2 hardware), and once things are going well and have settled down, they can then open the floodgates to Switch 2 exclusive software.
 
Sakura said:
Who are these big AAA devs that can't get kits? MS, Sega, Capcom, Konami, CDPR, Square Enix, 2K, Bandai Namco, Koei Tecmo, EA, etc all have kits. I have a hard time believing there are a number of AAA devs wanting to make Switch 2 games that Nintendo is refusing for the heck of it.
For indie devs, I could see that. A lot of them probably could just release their game on Switch 1 and have it work on Switch 2 via back compat. But then you can't make much use of the hardware.
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Exactly, it's all about reading in between the lines with stuff like this. Cause maybe they talked to some random outsource studio you've never heard of who did, NPC rigging for some Assassin's Creed game, and they can't get a dev kit. Well, that's not something worth talking about or getting hits online, so the story becomes "oh yeah this developer who developed a big AAA game!"

If they're not saying who it is, it's because it doesn't matter.
 
touchfuzzy said:
Exactly, it's all about reading in between the lines with stuff like this. Cause maybe they talked to some random outsource studio you've never heard of who did, NPC rigging for some Assassin's Creed game, and they can't get a dev kit. Well, that's not something worth talking about or getting hits online, so the story becomes "oh yeah this developer who developed a big AAA game!"

If they're not saying who it is, it's because it doesn't matter.
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They seem to emphasize its a lot of devs that haven't gotten their hands on a kit yet

And when people say things like DF did its usually an off the record type of conversation

And these types of comments do matter imo, it can answer why 3rd party support is limited early on
 
HeisenbergFX4 said:
They seem to emphasize its a lot of devs that haven't gotten their hands on a kit yet

And when people say things like DF did its usually an off the record type of conversation

And these types of comments do matter imo, it can answer why 3rd party support is limited early on
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Yeah but I can't really think of many AAA devs that don't already have games released or releasing on the Switch 2. Ubisoft and Activision should have dev kits too considering their Switch 2 games.
I can understand small/indie devs, but I don't get the "some big AAA developers" part.
 
Chukhopops said:
I mean we know Square Enix got one, Capcom did, Altus / Sega did, NIS did so that's most of Japan taken care of. For the west CDPR got it, 2K did since they made the Civ 7 version.

Edit: also UbiSoft is making a camera version of Just Dance afaik?

Really curious what kind of AAA devs didn't get any but I doubt it's gigantic ones.
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I wonder if it was devs that couldn't commit to releasing games on the Switch 2 because seems like plenty of other devs got kits.
 
Warspite said:
I wonder if it was devs that couldn't commit to releasing games on the Switch 2 because seems like plenty of other devs got kits.
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Could be three things:
- Nintendo wanted to force some devs to release Switch games so supply remains steady for Switch users;
- the devs mentioned by DF are not AAA but complete Dustborn-tier nobodies;
- Nintendo fucked up its supply of dev kits and made choices.
 
Danny Dudekisser said:
It's being handled poorly. It is very region dependent, so European devs are having a harder time than say... South American ones. They're also pretty adamant that they don't want the Switch 2 to immediately turn into a dumping ground for back catalog ports. Either way, Ninty's really playing this one close to the chest, however you wanna slice it.
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I was quite surprised that we didn't get more PS4 ports at launch. If I'm understanding you correctly, are you saying Nintendo is intentionally preventing that?
HeisenbergFX4 said:
Its why I brought that up in the COD not coming to S2 at release thread, it was a pretty openly known "secret" that kits were very limited on who got them

I am not saying this was the issue with COD not making it at launch because I don't know if they have their kit or not
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Do you know if the situation has changed at all since launch?
 
HeisenbergFX4 said:
I heard about this about 3 weeks ago or so that some larger named Devs had not received their kits yet but don't know if its gotten better in the last couple of weeks
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Thank you for replying. So it could that be that there are AAA publishers where some teams have dev kits, but other teams at the same publisher do not.
 
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