10tons discusses their major push for Switch support

A portion of a Miketendo64 interview with developer 10tons...

Miketendo64: Well, given the fact you guys are heavily supporting Nintendo’s latest home console due to all the constant releases, you guys must think a lot of the Nintendo Switch, in your own words, what are your feelings?

10tons: Switch is a great platform overall and an especially good fit for our titles. As we’ve always been a multiplatform developer, even supporting mobile for a number of years, there’s a certain way we develop our titles. We aim for relatively low technical performance needs, so we won’t have huge issues in that regard when bringing our titles to mobile.

We obviously can’t support the low end of mobile, as we need a certain level of graphical finesse to have our titles look great on a TV. Switch stands right in the middlepoint of these worlds, and even combines them by supporting both console type gamepads and mobile type touch screen! So if there’s a category of devices that our games were made specifically for, it’d be Switch and PS Vita. Sadly Vita’s hardware is aged by now, and we won’t be able to support it for long.

We’ve also been very pleased with the developer tools and publishing services Nintendo has provided for Switch developers, all of that is just very good. PS4 and Xbox One appear very similar to us in pretty much every regard. The hardware is practically identical, the publishing experience is very similar on top level, financial performance is very similar, marketing opportunities and challenges are similar and audiences are similar.

What sort of worries us, is the discoverability challenge. PS4 is flooded with releases, and the store team has taken steps to increase the feature slots. Xbox One isn’t quite as flooded and thus far the discoverability is somewhat better. Switch is rapidly catching and probably actually overtaken Xbox One in amount of weekly releases, and it’s possible it’ll be close to PS4 soon. Some changes to eShop to address the volume of releases seem likely within the next year. Steam is the most progressive about discoverability, as they obviously need to be, seeing how Steam is getting a month’s worth of console releases in a day.