Nintendo expects Switch ports to arrive much sooner starting next year

This week at E3, Nintendo and Epic revealed that the biggest game of the moment — Fortnite — would be coming to the Switch. While it was exciting news for fans of the battle royale game, it also represented something of a trend; multi-platform games that launch on the Switch often do so long after they’ve already been available on other platforms.

Fortnite first hit other consoles back in July, for instance, while Bethesda’s Wolfenstein II originally came out last October but won’t be on the Switch until later this month. However, while these kinds of delays have been common during the early stages of the Switch’s lifespan, Nintendo believes that this will change very soon as the platform matures.

“We’re talking today about a platform that is 16 months old,” Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé tells The Verge at E3. “The development cycle today is multiple years. So I would argue that beginning at the end of this year, or next year, that gap will have closed. Because key developers have had the development systems, they’ll have been working to create content for our platform from the beginning. That’s what is going to close that time gap.”

According to Fils-Aimé, the Switch is now home to more than 700 games, and at the company’s E3 presentation it showed off a surprisingly diverse lineup that included indie games, third-party titles, and big Nintendo releases like the new Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Pokémon: Let’s Go. “That is something we’ve been trying to create for some time,” Fils-Aimé says of the breadth of titles on display this week, “and it’s something we try to create with every platform. We’re achieving that with Switch.”