Take-Two Interactive & EA Comment On Nintendo Switch
At the Credit Suisse 2016 Annual Technology Conference, both EA and Take Two executives issued comments about the Nintendo Switch. We know both are listed as official developers for Nintendo’s new console, but neither have officially announced any games for it. We’re under the impression that Nintendo has asked developers to keep their games secret until after the system is officially unveiled on January 12.
According to WCCFTech, Take-Two’s president, Karl Slatoff, said:
The folks at Nintendo are making a great effort to support third-party developers, we’re very optimistic on the Switch though we are not announcing anything specific today.
It’s good to hear that Nintendo is supposedly putting for some solid efforts to court third parties. In the past they’ve had some difficulty obtaining the support they needed to have a robust gaming library. Time will tell if this will bear fruit for the upcoming Switch. The preview trailer for the Switch did show off a basketball game that looked like a 2K title, so we are expecting a game in that series to be announced for the Switch.
DualShockers is reporting that Peter Moore of EA commented:
Nintendo has always been and will always be a very important partner in this industry. They have some of the best first-party development studios in the world, and some of the most valuable intellectual properties in the world. We have announced publicly that we have a partnership with them on their new platform, the Switch. We haven’t talked in detail on what’s that about. You can imagine, as you heard, that a major game will be distributed on that platform.
We’re huge fans. We have a relationship that goes many decades back. They’ve had some difficult times as of recently obviously, but never, ever, ever discount Nintendo in this marketplace, and their ability to leverage their superb game development opportunities. Their intellectual properties, whether it’s Mario, whether it’s Zelda, whether it’s Metroid Prime, we could go on forever about what they can do… obviously Pokémon, we’ve seen more recently.
We’re gonna watch with interest and you can rest assured that EA, just like every major publisher, is in regular conversations with Nintendo.
EA is a little less boastful about the Switch. It looks like they are minimally supporting the new system with one new major title. If we had to take a stab at which game is in development, it would probably be Madden. We’re under the impression that EA is required to put at least one Madden game on every first-party released console or handheld to keep up their end of the contract negotiated with the NFL for exclusivity rights on licensed football games. Of course, it could be another game, but it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to see Madden make an appearance.
[Sources: WCCFTech & DualShockers]
Craig has been covering the video game industry since 1995. His work has been published across a wide spectrum of media sites. He’s currently the Editor-In-Chief of Nintendo Times and contributes to Gaming Age.
