The Switch seems to have generally more positive third party sentiment around it than the Wii U or even the Nintendo 3DS did- but as of right now, we don’t have a lot of tangible Nintendo Switch third party games to show for it. In an interview published by The Telegraph, Yoshiaki Koizumi (Deputy General Manager of Entertainment Planning and Development) discussed this matter, noting that more third party game announcements will be coming soon.
“As you know we’ve been focussed on development on first party games, but with Nintendo Switch we’ve also put a lot of energy into making third-party cooperation possible, and that includes a lot of attention paid to the development environment that we are providing to these partners as well as the middleware we create for them. Soon you will [see] a lot more announcements from third-party partners,” Koizumi said.
Koizumi also discussed the kind of support that Nintendo is providing third party developers, to enable easier development for the platform. “I think a lot of it comes down to the development environment we’re providing- because these are third-party providers that are bringing games to Nintendo hardware, we want to do everything we can to make that experience comfortable for them including providing support for Unity or Unreal 4, which are platforms a lot of people are already using,” he said. “So one example I can give of this is SnipperClips which is made by a very small development team in England, which uses Unity so they were able to develop it very quickly.”
All of this sounds encouraging- the entire rhetoric surrounding third parties and the Nintendo Switch sounds encouraging. That is not the problem. I just want to see the actual results, at this point. The Nintendo Switch itself launches on March 3.
