EA’s support for the Nintendo Switch has been extremely lacking thus far. We’ve received two half hearted FIFA games from the publisher on the console, as well as the indie hit Fe. While a lot of criticism can be (rightly) leveled at the publisher for how it has handled a platform that is currently the fastest selling one of the generation, there are also actual technical reasons that have prevented EA from bringing more of their games over to the Switch.
Specifically—the Frostbite Engine. The Frostbite Engine is the engine that powers most of EA’s internally developed games, and thus far, it has not supported Switch, which rules out Switch versions of most EA games off the bat (even FIFA has to be built on a custom engine for Switch). However, going forward, that may be changing.
YouTuber Doctre81 has discovered an interesting snippet on EA’s LinkedIn page (you can see a screenshot of the relevant portion below)—specifically noting that software engineers at the company have been involved in engineering their software development pipelines for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC for the Nintendo Switch. Games that use said pipelines include, apparently, Anthem and Battlefield 5, both of which are Frostbite games, which leads to a pretty obvious conclusion.
If this is true, then there are several takeaways—more of EA’s games, especially their sports games, can now come to the Switch going forward. And, it seems like EA may finally be beginning to take the Switch more seriously. Perhaps two years of record breaking sales was all that was needed to change their mind in the end.
