Hollywood Reporter has been given the opportunity to chat with Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime to discuss a variety of topics. One question posed to Reggie was why Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t present on the Nintendo Switch. Reggie says it was down to the fact that development started on the game many years ago.
That being said, when a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out, is that something you’re interested in having on the Switch?
Absolutely. We’d love for it to be there. But again — and this is where there needs to be an understanding of just the development process — Red Dead has been in development for years, time that predated any communication of Nintendo Switch. So, from the developer’s mentality, they need to move forward and finish the game they’ve been working on and then be in a position to look at other opportunities. Any game from a key third-party that’s coming out now, typically that development started well before any conversations about Nintendo Switch. What happens moving forward? We’ll see. But that’s how you wind up with a situation with Red Dead not being available on our platform.
There’s no way on earth this game will run on the switch.
Nothing to do with the development.
It may grace a Nintendo console, but it will probably be when the games about 5 yrs old and Nintendo have a console capable of running it.
Honestly we may be getting a more powerful switch next year. And its not that much about hardware, there is a lot they could do that wouldn’t effect gameplay but would allow the game to run on switch.
That said, i think the game would be a much better experience on Xbox. Same with ark…..why is that even on the switch?
It has everything to do with hardware. You have to understand that the only reason that the Switch can get some of the more visually interesting titles like Doom, Wolfenstein 2, and Warframe is because they’re corridor shooters that are 1080p60 on other platforms so they were able to drop the resolution by 60% or more and half the frame rate. Even then, they had to lower texture quality and lower polygon counts and those games still have significant frame dips.
You can’t do that easily with open world games that run at 1080p30 on other systems.
If a new version of the Switch can come out next year with 8GB of RAM with an SOC based on the Tegra X2 and it would still be way weaker than the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. It would have less bandwidth than the Xbox One WITHOUT the on-chip memory and with at least half as much actual GPU power and neither of those things would do much to counter-act the fact that Red Dead Redemption 2 is 105 GB on XBox One and 96 GB of PS4. It literally comes on TWO Blu-rays.
Now the Switch version would only get the lower quality models and textures and it has a newer, better form of texture compression so that would make it smaller but that wouldn’t even bring the game down to half it’s size because of all the audio. Since it’s an open world game, the ability to load chunks of the game world fast enough is extremely important and Switch game cards are about 1/4th the speed of the hard drives on other systems. Now if they applied lossless compression on a lot of the games assets then it would bring down game size but only CPU intensive compression algorithms would even make a dent and without hardware decompression that would only serve to increase load times and lower performance more.
You’d be surprised as would I.
The internal tech of the Switch is fairly underpowered compared to the competition, but some devs (looking at you Panic Button) have worked absolute wonders on the hardware.
We can do quite a lot with very little when it comes to tech. We just haven’t had to approach developement from that perspective in over a decade.
This statement is a paradox.
How so?
Watch it come out on the next playstation and xbox but not the switch. What will reggie’s excuse be then.
He’s not entirely wrong. Of course the Red Dead 2 that is out now wouldn’t run on the Switch exactly like this, but even if it did, the game wouldn’t come out for the Switch because of the reasons he stated. What he says isn’t necessarily that this game would’ve come out for the Switch, but that games that have been in development for years, with other platforms in mind, don’t even have a chance to come out for the Switch at the same time.
I would like gta on the switch honestly or even redemption 1. I think I’m one of the few that hasn’t played gta in a long time lol I never even got around to playing GTA 4. Chinatown wars was great on ds they should do one of those for switch.
I would rather a remake of RDR. To let you know they didn’t say the game was impossible, they just said releasing it on other systems would require them to get it running on RAGE 3 and then put it on other systems.
Lol oh Reggie, you and your rehearsed PR BS.
I’m not surprised its not on Switch but i don’t understand why the original isn’t. Reggies reasoning is correct but its not the main reason.
Someone should quote him on this and show it to him in 2020 when multiplats are still skipping the Switch.
There’s no way the Switch could handle a game as huge and graphically impressive as Red Dead Redemption 2. I doubt we’ll EVER see it on Switch.
Well, I guarantee we won’t.
RDR 2 isn’t even that graphically impressive, it only has slightly better detailing compared to RDR. With optimization it could run on switch.
The “it isn’t on Switch because development started years before Nintendo spoke to 3rd parties about the Switch” is used for 3 reasons: 1. because it’s true, 2. because it won’t actually run on Switch because it’s behind the systems the game is already on (least not without neutering the game ala some multiplatform games on Wii (Spider-Man 3 game sucked ass on Wii!), and finally 3. … Well fuck! I forgot what I was gonna list as the 3rd option… (Wah wah wah!) Oh! I remember! It’s an excuse from 3rd parties because they don’t want to put in the time and money to make the game work on the Switch.
There. 3 Reasons Why.
Lol. Tell the truth Reggie…! ^^