Digital Extremes, the studio making Warframe, confirmed a rumor about the availability of Nintendo Switch 2 developer kits.
As reported by Eurogamer, Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair said this to the press during Tennocon:
Our tech team is so excited to take advantage of the [Switch 2’s] high-speed cores and the other really cool features of it, [but] there’s just such a backlog for dev kits.
I know our programmers are just like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait’. So, we definitely have plans. And when we get a dev kit we’ll be doing a custom build for Warframe, absolutely.
Sinclair went on to talk about how it is possible to play Warframe now on the Switch 2, but that was not worked on by Digital Extremes themselves. As the designers of the Switch 2 explained themselves, they used a translation layer to get Switch games running on Switch 2. Consequently, Nintendo themselves put the work in on applying the translation layer, so that the Switch’s game library could also work on the Switch 2.
Sinclair talked about wanting to push the console to its limits, using the extra cores to gain things like faster load times. Interestingly enough, it looks like this could be the case for all these other game developers.
There’s already a rumor of a shortage of Switch 2 dev kits from last week. As shared by Nate The Hate, a lot of smaller developers are still waiting for Nintendo to get back to them about acquiring dev kits. Nate seemed to be convinced that AAA game studios got dev kits just fine, but the circumstantial evidence implies otherwise.
Capcom got a port of Street Fighter 6 ready for the Switch 2 at launch, but they went on record that they still need to study the console before they consider porting Monster Hunter Wilds to it. Subsequently, we’ve seen Microsoft release Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 on the Switch 2, but they have yet to live up to their promise to bring Call of Duty games to Nintendo’s platforms.
Nintendo seems to be in a similar position to where they were with the Family Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980s. An ongoing shortage of chips at the time prompted them to limit the number of third-party titles for the platform. Hopefully, whatever the reasons for this shortage is, they will be ending much sooner so that third-parties can get their games updated, and also make new games for the Switch 2.
There’s a real possibility that this dev kit shortage leads to a drought of new games for Nintendo’s latest console.
