It’s no secret the Nintendo Switch is hot – it’s still hard to get a unit, and NPD says physical software sales are on pace to be the biggest ever for a Nintendo platform launch year since ‘95. Two weeks ago, 18 games were released for Nintendo Switch, and the pace won’t slow down much through the end of 2017. How will the market evolve in 2018? Sure, a flood of casual shovelware is a good guess, but less clear is how the market for indies (“Nindies”) will shape up. GI Biz took a look at this, with some notable indie devs offering opinions on discoverability and inevitable eShop saturation. However, the focus here is primarily on speed-to-market, in other words the “gold rush”. Our view? Indie successes will soon be dependent on gameplay mechanics developed natively for the Switch. Similar to how Apple tends to “feature” games that push the hardware (and don’t come out the same day on Google Play), we think in the indie realm Nintendo will start focusing less on ports of notable Steam games, and more on fresh titles that are Switch exclusive, or at least “Switch first”.
