It’s not uncommon in the gaming industry for a company to prefer to work with a specific publisher, or even a specific team. But, those who are in the multi-platform industry, it does become somewhat obvious when a certain title, or a certain dev, won’t come to a certain platform. For years, fans have been asking Bethesda to bring their titles to the platforms of Nintendo. But for whatever reason, they didn’t. At least, not until the Nintendo Switch, of which they have pledged pretty much full support.
But why? Why now? What did the Switch have that the others didn’t? Well, the answer is simply…tech. This is what Bethesda’s Pete Hines revealed recently at a panel. He said that the team got a hold of a Switch early, and saw potential:
“So we did get to see a pretty early prototype of the Switch sometime before they announced it and I think from them we were pretty well sold on the idea. For one thing, we couldn’t have a platform without Skyrim on it, so… but myself and Todd Howard and Todd Vaughn and a few other folks in the company saw it and they had some rough demos.”
He went on:
So as we looked at the specs, we started looking at games like Skyrim and Doom and Wolfenstein, and we were fortunate enough to either have really talented devs who were also very keen on making it which I think is important or finding a great partner in Panic Button who had the ability to take what we were doing and say, ‘Yeah we can make that happen on a Switch.’ And we just think it’s a really cool piece of tech… Nintendo still does really well with Nintendo things.
So while it’s still true that Bethesda didn’t support the Wii U or Wii, they can say that they’re making an effort to support the Switch. In fact, they’ve said that they’re considering a Switch port for every single game they make.
