The 12 Days Of Switchmas: Day 4 – Third Party Support & Title Parity

It’s Day 4 of our 12 Days of Switchmas, and the editors have foolishly given it to me! (Be sure you check out Day 3 here). We all have our personal wishes and desires for the upcoming console from Nintendo, and today I am going to be talking all about mine: Third Party Support & Title Parity.

One of, if not the biggest, complaint Nintendo has received over the last decade (or two) is its third party support – or rather,the lack thereof. Nintendo is the juggernaut of video gaming; they saved the video game industry in 1985 with the North America release of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) &  R.O.B. accessory. Hell up until 2004, most people just referred to playing video games as “Playing Nintendo”.

So why is third party support such a big problem for them? The NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64 all defined their respective generations; each had legendary third party titles released on them. To this day Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES is hailed as the best release of the game. So what happened?

Omitting the “Nintendo Seal of Quality” and their stance on content, the biggest limiting factor is their decision for hardware architecture. Switching to the IBM PowerPC family of chips for the Wii and Wii U was a big problem for third party developers, especially if they wanted to have a title released on all three consoles and PC. Coupled with the consoles’ gimmicks (motion, gamepad, touch, etc.), and the weaker overall hardware,  it became a perfect storm for a third party mutiny. Call of Duty: Black Ops was particularly disgusting on the Wii.

I am a Nintendo boy at heart (well, I was a Sega boy until they gave up making hardware and switched to destroying their characters). I want to see Nintendo talked about in the same light as Sony and Microsoft when it comes to gaming. I miss the days of going out and getting a game on the GameCube that my buddy had on his PS2, so we could play through the same title and share the same experience. I want Nintendo to be the big boys on the block again.

I also think it will be a more competitive market benefiting the consumer. Right now, to be a complete gamer, you have to get your PC, your “flagship” console of choice, and your “Nintendo”, to be able to have a full grasp on the market. If Nintendo releases a powerful console that third party developers can produce similar content, we as consumers will win.

The PS4 and Xbox One are both running AMD APU’s, which are very extremely common and easily produced on architecture. The Switch will be shipping with an NVIDIA Tegra chip (specific stats and model have yet to be released). This means the three major consoles, and the PC market have the(mostly) the same hardware, which means developers can easily produce a game in parity, and port it over to each platform. The only challenge going forward would be integrating the consoles’ specific quirks. Motion/VR/Move on the PS4. Kinect for Xbox One. Tablet/portability for the Switch.

These hopes and dreams all seem to be doable and could be cresting the horizon. Skyrim Remastered was shown in the Switch launch trailer, and the myriad of third party developers confirmed to be working on titles for the console really have us in high hopes.

This is still all speculations, hopes and dreams. Switchmas is still a few days away, so lets hope Shiggy got our lists and checked them twice.