Gamescom 2025 has been and gone and it seems a lot of developers who attended the large gaming show have been unable to get Nintendo Switch 2 development kits. Digital Foundry said that it spoke to a large number of developers big and small and the main thing on their mind was the lack of development kits for the Nintendo Switch 2. It seems that they have been distributed randomly with some smaller developers able to get them and some AAA publishers who have yet to receive one. So much so that Digital Foundry speculates that it’s almost like Nintendo doesn’t want them to develop for the successor.
John: “Nintendo seems to be almost discouraging Switch 2 development to some degree, where I’ve spoken with plenty of developers where they were either told that their game.. they should just ship it on Switch 1 and rely on backwards compatibility. There’s a lot of developers that are unable to get Switch 2 dev kits. We talked to a lot of devs at Gamescom this year and so many of them said the same things. They want to ship on Switch 2. They would love to do Switch 2 versions. They can’t get the hardware. It’s really difficult right now.”
Oliver: “I don’t really understand the strategy because like you said, even now developers are struggling to get systems. And I know that some months ago when we’re, you know, hearing things through the grapevine and talking to people, there were some weird exclusions with some big developers struggling to get kits for games, from what we’ve heard. And there were some weird inclusions as well, like some indies were included which is nice to see but like there’s that campfire game you know the kind of camera campfire game and they’re getting kits and some big developers on the other hand who developed like AAA stuff aren’t necessarily in the pipeline there for kits.”
