#332: Silence kit

I forgot that the fancy Switch 2 edition of Kirby And The Forgotten Land was coming out this week. It’s one of a number of games that I bought for Switch and rather quickly put to one side; I’m afraid I was still in my elitist new-PC phase at the time and, bristling at its cludgy framerate and smeary visuals — and with the global games press insisting that a Switch Pro or outright Switch successor was coming any day now pal, honest — I abandoned it after a few hours, figuring some sort of next-gen tart-up was inevitable. 

It was only yesterday, when my youngest, who has been playing it on Switch of late, blissfully ignorant of its technical shortcomings — ah, the innocence of youth! To be so young and stupid and annoying again! — tottered over to ask when the Switch 2 edition, and its accompanying expansion, was coming out. I googled it, saw the date, and if I were a cartoon character, would have done that eyes-popping-out-on-stalks thing. “Erm… today!” I downloaded it immediately, and had a pleasant couple of hours on it. (I say ‘pleasant’; the boys were watching. They have both completed it, and kept barking instructions at me. Let father play his games, children. He knows, mostly, what he is doing.) I’m glad I forgot about it! It was a lovely surprise.

The thing is, I forget about the Switch 2 quite a lot. It was a Mario Kart machine for a couple of weeks at launch, and a Bananza one for a little while in July. Now it’ll be the Kirby system for a spell, until I move onto something else and forget all about it again. This is quite a novel feeling, I think, where new hardware is concerned. Traditionally, the first months with a new machine have always been about justifying the purchase of the thing, and its presence in your house; you’ll buy thirdparty ports on it just so you can use it, make it your indie platform of choice, that sort of thing.

Switch 2, though, has very quickly assumed the old role of its predecessor. It is a console I barely notice exists until some big firstparty banger comes along and it briefly takes over my life. This makes sense, I suppose, since it is a Switch 1.5 at heart — a noticeable but ultimately modest upgrade on its forebear that plays all the same games, and a few new ones on top. Besides, it’s a Nintendo console! We buy these things for Nintendo games; stuff that is unlike anything else out there, and unplayable anywhere else. Of course these will be the headline attractions. 'twas ever thus, I suppose.

Yet at the heart of my neglect of Switch 2 is the fact that it just doesn’t have very many new games — and since launch day there's been very, very little of note that's not made by Nintendo. That’s been brought into sharp relief this week by some podcast chatter from the newly independent bods at Digital Foundry, suggesting that Nintendo is being a bit stingy with Switch 2 dev kits. “So many of them said the same thing,” DF's John Linneman said. “They want to ship on the Switch 2. They would love to do Switch 2 versions [of their games], but they can't get the hardware.” This isn't just about indies, either: apparently some pretty big outfits are also being frozen out.

It appears Nintendo is suggesting teams continue to ship on the old console, and rely on backwards compatibility to make it available on the new one. I know from my own conversations with developers that while this solution makes a game purchasable, and playable, on Switch 2, it prevents you from leveraging its boosted capabilities. Sure, you can ship with an unlocked framerate, cross your fingers and hope it hits 60fps on the new machine; you can hope the Switch 2's innards make your game look presentable on its higher-res display. But without a devkit, you can’t test any of it to be sure. 'Ship and hope it works' isn't a particularly viable strategy in this day and age, to the extent that it ever was.

In the build-up to launch, we all figured that Nintendo was being selective about which studios got devkits because of its increasingly deep-seated paranoia over leaks; all it needed was one unscrupulous development partner to break NDA, and all that carefully crafted Switch 2 mystique would evaporate. That surely can't be a factor anymore. This week I’ve seen it suggested that Nintendo wants all the early attention, and spending, to be on its own games, maximising revenue from early adopters before opening the system up to the hoi polloi and sure, I can see that, though it seems a bit self-defeating, and frankly a bit small-time. Some have also speculated that Nintendo wants to keep the quality bar up — a theory that rather melts when we remember that ghastly campfire game. For a while I wondered whether it was about trying to avoid a repeat of the avalanche of asset-flipping, IP-thieving slop that’s infested the Switch 1 eShop. But that hardly works when the vast majority of the old store's catalogue is available on Switch 2, does it?

Maybe there’s an element of truth in all those theories. The only thing that really matters is that it sucks. We buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, sure. But Switch 1 owes a huge part of its success to the support of the very studios it is now treating like second-class citizens. Nintendo might believe that, by making sure the big indie hitters — your Team Cherrys, Supergiants and Hello Gameseseses — had access to the thing before launch, it has covered the necessary bases. But where is Switch’s next Hollow Knight, Hades or No Man’s Sky going to come from if the stars of tomorrow aren’t given the same opportunities on Switch 2 that their predecessors enjoyed on Switch 1? Worse yet, what does it tell us about the current state and shape of Nintendo that it thinks its new console will be fine without them? Nothing good, I reckon. I cannot live entirely on carefully spaced-out tart-ups of rickety late-era Switch games, however lovely they are. 

There you go! There’s no MORE! today I’m afraid. I spent the morning rushing around with the goblins doing various last-minute back-to-school things and, despite rattling this out at the double, simply don’t have the time. The summer holidays will finally be at an end next week, and I honestly cannot wait. It’s been a lovely time but I’m skint, out of ideas and so very, very tired, and am thoroughly looking forward to just sitting down and getting on with some work. Normal business will be resumed very soon. Have a lovely weekend!