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

It's not a matter of hardware it's a matter of market. The Switch has plenty of games people think it couldn't run and there are very low chances the switch successor will have the games you listed.

I think it is complex and was a huge point of discussion and debate at the tail end of the Wii U/early in the Switch lifecycle.

Some games can't run or would require significant effort to make run on weaker hardware but this is rarely the full reason. Google ultimately failed to get publishers to put games on Stadia and those games were running on a PC behind the scenes.

Some publishers will always dodge Nintendo hardware because they either don't think their game will find a market on Nintendo consoles (we've still not seen a Call of Duty!) or because they don't think the deal from Nintendo is good enough behind the scenes in ways that we're not always privy to. Sometimes it is just timing - the marketing budget gets spent all at one time and if a big game release misses that launch window then it struggles without the marketing campaign to latch on to. I'd imagine this is why we've never had Fallout on Switch when early on and after the success of Skyrim it seemed like a no-brainer. If they'd released a multi-format "Fallout 3 definitive edition" then a Switch release would have happened.

There are also definitely some publishers with agendas that go beyond the immediate superficial aspects of business. EA certainly seem to have a long term plan that plays better for them financially if Nintendo is out the hardware business.

A new 3D Mario, new Mario Kart, Metroid 6...and not Metroid Prime 4.

@skywake shrugs when we have devs saying that Nintendo doesn't have that underground feel, and companies that have long complained about competing with Nintendo first parties (but no issues with competing with Sony's ....I'd say MS but they don't have much right now) I'm fine with my assessment. Even when switch got the install base and devs had engines that they could scale, the switch was/is still the after thought or ignored by many devs. If it was just about making money, publishers would be pushing to carve out a space in the Switch's large install base just like they do for mobile. Like many did for the wii; even if it doesn't always mean the same products. However, some devs do only legacy content if they have it, or the least amount of support possible. It's been like that since the N64 days and if the switch having the install base it does didn't spur devs on, I still say even if Nintendo said f it and made a PS5/Series X competitor they still would get snubbed by some devs.

I'll be happy if I'm proven wrong, but history doesn't look like it. Emotion exists in business, especially if one doesn't have to go to a particular source to get their profits. Because these publishers and devs (mostly the western set) make good money from other sources, they can afford to to not make an effort. Publishers used to put games on nearly anything that could run a game, (handheld version, console version (which all the major players getting something and even early mobile like ngage) but that has changed now because of whale hunting/microtransaction culture and partially because companies used to feed the console war concept which of course was just viral marketing that worked very well because people are tribal. Also while perhaps not publishers and executives (except companies that grew from small garage outfits like bethesda for instance), devs are most certainly influenced by their bias. What games they grew up with, what they think is cool, what they are familiar with tool wise, there is a lot of personal bias and emotion that goes into game creation that imo is less prevalent in other types of software development (I'm not a dev but I do have to write programs/scripts/reports for work and work with the dev teams). Like I said, I'd like to be wrong but based on what I've seen and heard, I'm standing by my assessment.

Edit: I will say that the current rerelease culture that has infused gaming has worked in the switch's favor however as we are getting some games that we wouldn't otherwise. Although that doesn't explain why Switch hasn't gotten GTA V (or lower) since that re releases every time a new console comes out.

@Ryu_Niiyama
I stand by my point. Those PR statements you get from studios don't change the fact that there would have been a decision made at some point. You're spending that much on a release, someone is running that cost/benefit analysis. And the cold-hard truth is Nintendo's platforms have generally stood out by themselves as hardware that is seriously limited in some way or another

To be fair, since the mid 90s there were probably two points where Nintendo had fairly similar hardware to everyone else. The N64 was obviously a vastly different approach compared to Playstation and Saturn. Which is the clear reason why studios like Square jumped ship. You get to the Gamecube and there's this brief period of relative platform uniformity, at least for the time. And that lasted until the 360/PS3 launch broke it. Although at least with the Wii studios already know how to make Gamecube games so Wii is easy to handle. And handle it they do given the install base

Then we get to the Wii U which is more or less a 360 with a screen in the controller. There's a "golden" year there where Nintendo is at parity with everyone else. Which is why early on the Wii U was relatively well supported...... given it was super late in the HD era and most larger studios were already looking at PS4/XBOne on the horizon

Also Wii U wasn't quite a 360 with a screen. While it had more RAM, larger media and (marginally) more compute than the 360 it also had significantly lower memory bandwidth. Also from what I understand that golden window of parity for the Wii U was marred by early dev-kits being late and a bit rushed. So if you were a Rockstar and looking at 2013 for a late title on 360 that really pushes the hardware to the edge? I'd say memory bandwidth, late dev-kits and eventually poor Wii U sales are enough to stop the idea of a Wii U port before it even gets off the ground

So yeah, no need for any emotive reasoning here. I suspect those statements are mostly just certain individuals speaking their mind in a way that gets the people on the platforms they're releasing on motivated. I'm sure if the bar for porting to Nintendo's hardware was lower those emotive reasons for not releasing on Nintendo would rapidly evaporate. But I don't think that technical bar for porting to Nintendo is going to disappear entirely anytime soon, even when new hardware releases

tl;dr
When Nintendo releases new hardware I don't think it really changes this equation that much. It will still be well out of step with the higher spec that some studios will want to be targeting. This is of course assuming it will still be a portable console with the spec constraints that come with that. Will it close the gap? Sure. But I don't think it will open the flood gates

The only * I'd put on that is that we're getting increasingly diminishing returns for higher specs. And potentially with things like the Steam Deck where heading into an era where people want their games to be portable and are happy to sacrifice a bit of detail for it. And with the prices at the high end going through the roof? Maybe in a few years Nintendo isn't THAT far off the median platform spec

@NeonPizza
To be fair the spec of the absolute top end matters less than the spec of the average consumer. Ultimately the goal of releasing games is to make money, you make money by reducing costs and maximising sales. So it's a little optimisation game in and of itself. The more flashy your game? The more interest there will (generally) be. But the higher up the spec ladder you aim the less people you can sell to

Right now? I'd say XBox Series S is the "median" spec. If you can release a game targeting Series S the majority of gamers will be able to play your game and you'll be able to push the game on the higher end to a fair degree. The Series S is more or less a similar spec to the PS4 Pro, which is well above anything you're going to get in a portable anytime soon. If a year or so down the road we get a PS5 Pro and an XBox Series X2-Super180? The median spec may shuffle up to the PS5. Alternatively if the Steam Deck is the start of a new era of more portable hardware? We might see the "median spec" shuffle down

But I think the most likely scenario is that Nintendo will hold some large fraction of the market that exists somewhere underneath the "median spec"

Metroid Prime 4 - starting to feel like vapourware that will end up as a launch title for the NS2.

When the successor does arrive, assuming it’s still a hybrid, it’s not likely to be anywhere near the current gen on specs. Nintendo wants to keep it affordable to avoid pricing out the family market. TBH, if it’s less powerful than the Steam Deck I wouldn’t be that surprised. Depends how long it takes - if it arrives in 2026, maybe it’ll be approaching Xbox Series S grunt. In which case, we could get things like Starfield, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring. Anything in the cross-gen period would be in play.