Rumor: Nintendo Did Not Give Embracer Group Switch 2 Dev Kits, For The Exact Reason You Would Think

Yesterday, we reported on rumors that Nintendo had been selective about sharing their dev kits to partner game companies. Today, we have news about one specific game company.

As shared on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit by user -LastGrail-, Imran Khan made these posts on ResetEra. Imran was responding to the news that Nintendo withheld their dev kits.

Here’s what Imran said:

“I know of at least one kind of big third party that didn’t get anything because Nintendo deemed them too chaotic at the moment. They were afraid the kits would go to studios that would then be closed down and then the kits might have gone missing.”

“Just to give my notifications a rest, yes, it was Embracer.

I don’t know if their plan changed (this story was from maybe eight months ago), but I know companies that split off from Embracer ended up going back to Nintendo and renegotiating and they were more amenable.”

If you take a few minutes to think about it, can you blame Nintendo? We would not be surprised if Sony was thinking the same thing just as they were launching the PlayStation 5 Pro. We won’t relitigate the messy restructuring that Embracer went through, but it would be unreasonable to expect that they would come out of it with zero consequences.

As Imran explained it, this was not a punishment per se. What it is is Nintendo questioning how well organized and managed the company was, and acting accordingly.

Now, there are only two companies that successfully split off from Embracer Group, instead of getting shut down, or somehow still staying alive in the company. Saber Interactive, which proved capable of running as an independent studio, found capital funding to become independent again. Meanwhile, Take-Two Interactive finally purchased Gearbox Studios.

Both Saber and Gearbox have published some games on the Switch between them, from the Borderlands franchise to World War Z. It’s easy to see them making future games, not just ports, to possibly take full advantage of Nintendo’s new hardware.

On the other hand, if you were looking forward to Gunfire Games to finally get an opportunity to fix Darksiders III with the Switch 2, since Gunfire Games is owned by Embracer, they were one of those studios who missed out at launch.

Maybe Nintendo has an in-house solution to improve performance of Switch games on Switch 2. This example of Gunfire Games should illustrate that the consequences of Embracer’s mistake aren’t just about Embracer and their management being embarrassed. It definitely trickles down to us gamers. Don’t be stories if more stories like this emerge about more consequences of Embracer’s actions in the coming months and even years.