Jeff Grubb has expressed his belief that Tecmo Koei and Capcom already have Switch 2 dev kits.
This is not a rumor from inside sources, but some well-founded speculation, and he has his own basis for saying so, so let’s discuss it.
In the latest episode of Jeff Grubb’s podcast called The Last of the Nintendogs, Jeff and co-host Mike Minotti were talking about the Switch 2. In spite of Nintendo’s official denial, Mike and Jeff do believe that the console will be revealed, and even released, soon.
As Mike was talking about how he can’t wait for Nintendo’s official announcement, Jeff pointed out something interesting. Every year, 4Gamer asks Japanese developers at the end of the year from across the different studios about their goals for 2023.
Jeff stated that Tecmo Koei and Capcom alluded to new hardware in their responses to 4Gamer. From these statements, Jeff came to the conclusion that both studios already have Switch 2 dev kits.
While we think Jeff is a generally reliable source when it comes to this information, we did try to verify this separately, but to mixed results.
SiliconEra covered the Tecmo Koei’s responses to 4Gamer. The developers who head different studios within Tecmo Koei alluded to both announced and unannounced projects, but SiliconEra’s translation does not have any mention of new hardware, from Nintendo or any other company.
Game8co has a translation from Capcom’s Masao Kawada, who is a producer on the Resident Evil franchise. Part of his response states that “2024 will also bring new consoles and more indie titles to look forward to.” The catch is that this translation was done via DeepL. While that does not mean this translation is inaccurate, without direct human translation we don’t know if the program captured nuances in Kawada’s message.
So we do have to mainly rely on Jeff’s word that they did make mention of new hardware. For what it’s worth, it is plausible that both companies do have Switch 2 dev kits, and that they felt confident to allude to them.
Tecmo Koei have very close relations with Nintendo. In fact, Nintendo owns several Fatal Frame titles as co-producer. Their studios Team Ninja, Gust, and Omega Force all also make many Nintendo exclusives.
We shouldn’t have to explain Capcom’s connection to Nintendo, but in particular they would be working together in releasing Resident Evil and Monster Hunter games, as well as their classic game library.
And of course, there’s no harm alluding to new hardware if they didn’t say it was Nintendo’s. So based on Jeff’s word, we may be expecting Tecmo Koei and Capcom titles to be among the first to arrive for the Switch 2.
