Nintendo Switch vs. Virtual Console Part 3: Company Breakdown

One of the more interesting results of my list is a breakdown of games by company brand. It was tricky to sort these out, since many games have been purchased and re-published by different companies for subsequent releases, but I tried to tie each game to the name I associated it with the most. So while a company like Hamster may be the “publisher” of many of these games on switch, I counted them under their original creators (not developers, per say) such as Konami, Jaleco and Sunsoft, adding them with whatever other numbers came from self-publishing or licensing out to others. Comparing support from each of these rights holders across the Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch tells an interesting story.

Titles By Company

I’ve swapped the order from the previous posts so that 3DS comes after Wii but before Wii U. This displays the change chronologically, which I think is relevant. We can see that Nintendo actually continued to increase the number of titles brought over from their own IP with each iteration of the virtual console, even as third parties pulled support for the less popular Wii U. Much of the decrease in virtual console titles overall is due to third parties like Sega, (who actually published more titles on wii virtual console than Nintendo themselves!) being absent from the wii U. While Nintendo has not surpassed their wii U output on switch yet, it’s important to remember that the Wii U virtual console also had a very deliberate drip feed of updates throughout its life. The NSO expansion pass will likely bring a lot more in the future. Switch’s increased total number of titles is then due to the colossal increase in titles from companies like Atari and SNK, and in SNK’s case, much of that was made possible by Hamster Corp’s “Arcade Archives Neogeo” line. Interestingly enough, Capcom has maintained an increasing trend across all systems, which I believe reflects a strategy at the company of pushing legacy content.

Titles By Company, Continued

Many other companies like Sega, Square, and Koei follow the trend of strong support on the Wii virtual console, to outright abandoning or withdrawing that support on the 3DS and Wii U, to hitting a new high with the Switch. Much of this reflects a shift from simply licensing games out for virtual console to doing re-masters and collections, which are likely more profitable for the rights holder. That certainly seems to be the case for companies like Square Enix, which has not put any games on the NSO app. Others, like Jaleco, have been freely licensing games to the app and to Hamster Corp, which has allowed their output on switch to increase more than double what was on the Wii VC. Natsume seems to be an outlier as their output on switch has not yet caught up: this is likely partly due to the licensing limbo the harvest moon/story of seasons series finds itself in.

While the above list isn’t exhaustive of every publisher to put games on each console, it highlights some of the smaller IP with more iconic catalogues. In some cases, we see an obvious trend of lower support for the wii U and 3DS as those systems were less popular, and thus virtual console sales were not as profitable. Those that have not supported the switch quite as much as previous generations have usually pursued another strategy, such as konami with the Turbografx mini, or Data East’s more robust support of the Evercade. One of the obstacles to bringing everything to switch is that there are more options for re-releasing games than there were in the days of Wii virtual console, and IP holders may consider those ways more appealing.

The main takeaway here is that much of the state of things is due to forces outside Nintendo, which have made license holders less eager to put their retro games on the switch. The best thing nintendo can do is continue to grow the switch’s install base, which has already brought back many of the publishers that left the virtual console on the wii U. With Sega becoming an official part of the NSO online app, could we see someone else cut a deal?

I hope all this analysis has brought some more perspective to the state of retro-gaming on switch. While Nintendo Switch Online may not be the “Netflix of Retro Gaming” some hoped, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. There are more ways than ever to re-release a game, and the marketplace reflects that. Nintendo has made it clear that the NSO apps are the way forward for them, but when it comes to the other giants in the industry, we will have to wait and see.