One Publisher Isn't Sold On The Nintendo Switch

Everyone is talking about the Nintendo Switch, the revolutionary new game console due for release in March of 2017. Nintendo recently announced it with a basic video that showcased some of its features and hybrid gaming capabilities. Well, one publisher isn't completely sold on this miracle machine.

According to Videogamer.com, Capcom is still in a wait-and-see mode when it comes to the Nintendo Switch. Answering questions for investors, the Resident Evil makers said...

Capcom goes on to further state that right now their focus is on the PS4 and Xbox One because they understand what gamers want from those machines, and they mentioned that when porting games over the features of the games need to align with the hardware capabilities of the system they're porting to. It makes sense, really.

During the Wii and Wii U run there were a ton of games ported over from the PS2 to the Wii that were little more than lazy cash-grabs. Sometimes the controls weren't very well refined, sometimes the graphics were actually worse after the port-job, and sometimes the playability just didn't match up so well. It was actually worse for the Wii U because it barely got any third-party games and when it did, they were mostly hack jobs, moved over from the Xbox 360 with just enough work put in to make the games functional. However, due to the hardware architecture being very different between the Wii U and 360 (although the 360 was the closest in architecture to the Wii U's design) a lot of games had graphical issues when it came to frame-rate stability and performance.

That's not to mention that a lot of games barely made use of the Wii U's GamePad, making it little more than a paperweight tablet for third-party titles.

Capcom is in a precarious position because they seem to be acknowledging that bad port-jobs help no one, but at the same time, they're likely weighing if it's worth investing into specific Nintendo Switch iterations of their games to help maximize the potential of both the game's brand and Nintendo's hardware.

The company's reservations make a lot of sense because they likely don't want to have to rework a game like Resident Evil 7 from the ground-up for the Nintendo Switch, but at the same time if the console manages to sell millions of units then it'll be a huge missed opportunity. The system's mobile capabilities mean it's not entirely on par with the Xbox One and PS4 when it comes to hardware specs, so it will require a different approach with the way the games appeal to the potential buyers of the Switch.

I think playing it safe and researching ways to make the porting easy and to accommodate the unique capabilities of the Switch is the better way about it because it avoids ending up in the trap that a lot of companies did with the Wii and Wii U.

We definitely might see games like Monster Hunter and Ace Attorney make their way onto the Nintendo Switch (since they're already on Nintendo's other platform), but games like Street Fighter, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil could be toss-ups.