Indies are in love with Switch

With the Wii U and 3DS, Nintendo had a strong supporting of indie developers on the platforms, but due to the region locking on each, there was usually a delay between the release of a game in one country and in another and when your team is under 20 people, that delay could grow by leaps and bounds. But now with Nintendo Switch being region free, it seems that issues like that are now a thing of the past, at least if the comments by Julius Guldbog, the community manager from indie developer Image & Form is anything to go by.

With the Wii U and 3DS, [Nintendo] started to realise that they had to get with the times. Publishing for Nintendo consoles has been, in the past, not a nightmare, but pretty close. They make sure every QA gate is good enough. It takes months, and you have to do that for every region, and if you fail, it takes even longer. You have to get a new slot, and release dates are pushed back.
But with the Switch, we only have to make one version and only have one launch – and that’s one version for the entire world, so we’ll have the same version in the US, Europe and a little bit later, Japan and China as well. That saves so much work. It means we can do the translations ourselves, we don’t have to have a new publisher for one specific region – it’s going to be so much easier. They’re basically taking the Steam or App Store approach: one version of the game for the entire world.

And it appears that it is not just the fact that only one game needs to be submitted, even how Nintendo is approaching new developers is different to how it was in the past.

From what I’ve seen, just using Nintendo’s publishing tools to set up everything from sales to getting the name right on the eShop, everything like that, it’s much more streamlined and more modern. Even Nintendo’s approach to how they get new indies to join the Switch family – nowadays, they see a good game at a convention and they just walk straight up to them and ask them to develop for Switch. From what I know, they’ve never done that before, so I think they are getting with the times. They know more than anyone what they did wrong with the Wii U, and 3DS in some cases as well, and they really want to fix that.

Of course, that is only one developer and during an interview with Area by Autodesk, Choice Provisions’ Josh Defries, one of the artists working on Runner 3, that the game only took them a single day to get up and running on Switch.

We were nervous at first about developing for the Switch, simply because there are always unknowns with new platforms. We ended up getting the game running on the console in only a day, however, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since!

And if that was all not proof enough, during a Reddit AMA for developer Sumo Digital, developers of Snake Pass, which just released, they noted the following:

Thanks to amazing support from both Nintendo and Epic, the porting process was relatively smooth and painless. Personally I see a lot of potential in the Switch. The fact that it runs UE4 the way it does means that there will be a steady stream of awesome games in the (near) future.

So there you go, not only is the region free console easier for the Indie studios to release their builds for, but it seems that the ease of development, as well as the power of the tools, like Unreal Engine 4 are making Nintendo Switch, a great console to make games for.