The Nintendo Switch 2 has been out of nearly three months, and it’s been one of the fasted-selling consoles ever since it’s June 5 release. And while Nintendo has released games for it and some third party ports are coming, there is still an issue with other developers not being able to get their games onto the new platform due to a lack of dev kits.
In the latest episode of Digital Foundry’s Direct Weekly show, John Linneman and Oliver Mackenzie spoke about what talks were like at Gamescom in Cologne. Part of those talks were about Nintendo not sending Switch 2 dev kits to a number of developers, including some AAA studios.
“Nintendo seems to be almost discouraging Switch 2 development to some degree, where I’ve spoken with plenty of developers where they were either told that their game, they should just ship it on Switch 1 and rely on backwards compatibility,” Linneman said. “There’s a lot of developers that are unable to get Switch 2 dev kits. We talked to a lot of devs at Gamescom this year and so many of them said the same things. They want to ship on Switch 2. They would love to do Switch 2 versions. They can’t get the hardware. It’s really difficult right now.”
From there, Mackenzie added that he had heard “through the grapevine” and from talking to others that there were “some weird exclusions with some big developers struggling to get kits for games.”
“And there were some weird inclusions as well, like some indies were included which is nice to see,” Mackenzie said. “But like there’s that campfire game you know the kind of camera campfire game and they’re getting kits and some big developers on the other hand who developed like AAA stuff aren’t necessarily in the pipeline there for kits.”
None of the studios who haven’t been able to get Switch 2 dev kits were mentioned, but they might be able to be guessed, especially if you want to dig into some larger studios without newer games announced for the platform. That said, fans will have to wait and see how third-party support grows on the console in the coming months and years.
What do you think of studios not being able to get Nintendo Switch 2 dev kits? Let us know down below, and join the discussion in the official Insider Gaming forums.
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