Topic: The games Nintendo fans won't get until the Switch successor arrives.

Just a foreword, this list is not an indictment of Nintendo's third party partners. The Switch is unequivocally the best third party supported Nintendo platform in the company's history. The point of this thread is to point out how (imo) too many publishers are opting for cloud versions of their games rather than getting them to run natively on the hardware. Whether that is due to the aging Tegra X1 SoC, the cost of the proprietary Switch cartridge, etc.

The following is a list of games Nintendo Switch fans probably won't get until the Switch's successor arrives.

Grand Theft Auto V
Devil May Cry 5
Street Fighter 6
Elden Ring
Final Fantasy XIV

At least...those are the top five "aren't going to happen" that come to my mind.

Am I right? Am I wrong? No doubt there are many others I've missed. But perhaps I excluded them for the sake of discussion?

Help me get through the doldrums of the here and now.

Also Madden, Call of duty, fallout, battlefield, Star wars battlefront, the Sims to name a few

@AppleroseGrace

I agree with most of that. Even though EA have thrown Switch owners a few games (Burnout Paradise, Unravel Two, etc) it seems EA still have a sour opinion of Nintendo. Although I'm surprised Bethesda haven't bothered to port Fallout 4 over to the Switch; I imagine Skyrim has sold reasonably well.

I'll throw in a bit of a curveball: Pokemon Gen 10. Not that the Switch wouldn't be able to run it perse: moreso the fact that I'd be shocked if we don't have a Switch successor by 2025 when this is most likely to come out (could you imagine though if we got a brand new Pokemon generation within the Switch 2's first year? That system would absolutely fly off the shelves I tell you).

@Magician Microsoft seems to be in general avoiding ports and remasters of games you can already play on Xbox console well via backwards compatibility. For example Halo Reach ran poorly on XB1 via backwards compatibility but the MCC version runs a lot better meanwhile Quake and Goldeneye were never playable on that system.

Mario Kart 9 immediately comes to mind.

Third party-wise, I imagine most AAA games will continue to avoid the platform entirely.

@Fizza Probably wouldn't be the console's first year, given how Pokemon works, but Gen 10 is probably going to be on the next console, given the pattern of having only two new pokemon generations on one system.

@Ralizah Although no Nintendo platform has ever launched with a Mario Kart game, I can wholeheartedly agree that MK9 is being held back for the Switch's successor.

@Magician MK8D was pretty close to launch for Switch. And pretty much a new game except for us sad sacks who purchased a Wii U previously.

I was pretty sure we weren't getting another Mario Kart game until 2024 at the earliest when they announced the Booster Pass courses.

Hard to say at this point. We got Witcher 3 and Nier Automata, so I'm reluctant to rule out anything from past gens.

Any AAA since 2020 however? Yeah, I don't see them coming to anything less powerful than a Switch successor.

Madden, but that is probably for the better considering how bad the game is. The only reason I don’t still play madden 21 is because i wanted to have zach Wilson in the game. ( if you can’t tell I am a byu fan)

A Red Dead Redemption game
A game from the NHL series
The latest Assassins Creed games

Honestly I'm not sure how much this will change when we inevitably get new hardware. For a game like GTA5 for example I feel like if they were going to port it to Nintendo hardware they would have done it already. It's not like average performance has stopped companies from trying to cash in on the Switch. I mean in relative terms it's not like the Switch is THAT far behind the PS4. At least not compared to how far behind the 3DS was to home consoles

I think the more interesting thing about new hardware is that it will open up new performance for the types of games that are already being ported. Those impossible ports will still happen and studios like Rockstar will probably still give Nintendo the finger. But instead god-tier ports like Doom Eternal making significant resolution/detail sacrifices and hitting a stable 30? We'll have ok-tier ports making minor resolution/detail cuts and still managing to hit a stable 60

Do people still even care about this? I know there were plenty of pages created on this forum complaining about it early on. But I'd think by this point people would have figured out how little it's actually needed. Always felt like just a bullet point people want to see on the box even if they never intend to actually use it.....

Most of those the successor likely still won’t get. A lot of those devs/project leaders have a specific view of the Nintendo demographic.

Nintendo could staple a RTX 4090 on the successor and certain devs would still find ways to avoid the system. Nintendo’s issue has never been solely a power problem. Devs/publishers just use that as the easy excuse.

F-zero, golden sun, wario land, mother 3, chibi robo, Zelda majoras mask 2, wind waker/twilight princess remakes, a good paper Mario, super mario odyssey 2, the legendary starfy, mario and Luigi rpg reboots, etc…
Oh wait those are never coming out.

@Ryu_Niiyama
Nah, I'm not sure I agree with this take. At the end of the day these are purely transactional decisions not emotive ones. And the truth is it takes a fair amount of effort (and therefore money) to port a game, especially when the platform is significantly different in terms of spec or architecture. Basically since the PS4/XBOne launched there has been basically uniformity in terms of architecture & spec across every platform.... except Nintendo

The fact that the (effective) spec gap isn't as significant with the Switch as it was with the Wii or 3DS and the fact that Nintendo basically has over a third of hardware sales? It certainly makes it a more attractive platform than previous Nintendo hardware for sure. But it's still 2/3rds of the market as basically PCs of a PS4 spec at a minimum and 1/3rd of the market as an ARM SoC with around the power of an XBox 360

If Nintendo released a x86 box with a 4090 in it I'm sure all of these publishers would be releasing on it. I mean, maybe not considering nobody would be buying it at that price. But you get the idea

Edit: and to be clear I'm not saying this is a bad thing. The reason the Switch is compelling is because it IS different. It's just that this difference adds to the effort required for releasing on it

The Switch gets a good chunk of it's third parties, from the bigger companies, from them releasing remasters accross multiple platforms. So if the Switch 2 was to get, say, a copy of Red Dead 2, then it would probably be when they decide to release a remaster across everything. It's the only way that most third party games achieve Nintendo first party like sales.

I mean, do we know? We don’t, only Nintendo does, so I can’t really say what we will, or won’t get, sorry if this was kinda a useless comment.

Metroid Prime 4, I definitely think it'll come to Switch given Nintendo didn't cancel the Wii U version of BotW but I think its release date will be after the successor's launch.

Given how Pikmin 4 appeared in September, I feel that before Nintendo announces the successor they will give reassurance that Switch games are infact still coming to the existing Switch. If I recall correctly the current "nowhere to be seen" games are Metroid Prime 4, Advance Wars and Detective Pikachu.