Easily one of the biggest surprises with the Nintendo Switch is that indie games are flourishing on it. Thank the system, or the indie devs, or the gamers buying them, but a TON of indie games have come onto the Switch and made a lot of sales for one reason or another. This is great, because it shows that The Big N have finally tapped into the indie market in a way that’s meaningful. However, as a recent revelation has shown, they may be letting that go to their heads, and that could hurt their indie advantage.
If you haven’t heard, Nintendo noted during a shareholders meeting that they want to bring 20-30 indie games a week to the Switch in the future. Almost immediately, the backlash was felt, as many gamers, including us here at the Nintendo Entertainment Podcast, noted that this was WAY too many indie games in a week, and now, some indie devs are saying the same thing.
“20-30 games per week seems WAY too much. I can’t see how this is positive for anyone, honestly,” Mutant Mudds developer Jools Watsham told IGN. “The market is already saturated, but the number of titles developers choose to release isn’t under Nintendo’s control.”
This is what many gamers have been noting. Even IF you could manage to do 20-30 games A WEEK, that’s both a lot of pressure on developers to get their titles done in a certain time frame, AND, the saturation element could make it so that while certain games succeed, others will flop because many people can’t buy all these games.
The CEO of Image and Form, who made the hit title Steamworld Dig 2, noted that the monster amount of games could actually hurt Nintendo as much as indie devs:
“Nintendo has a habit of curating content, which typically means approvals and manual labour on their end. It may not only be too many titles for the eShop, it may also be too much work for Nintendo to realistically cope with.”
Either way you look at it, Nintendo is making a bold decision to try and do this. Hopefully, they’ll listen to both gamers and the devs and ensure that all the indie games get their time in the sun.
