I think something Nintendo has begun to take more seriously of late is the idea of "owning a genre" or "creating a market for a genre" on their platforms. What this primarily means is that a good chunk of the audience that likes a particular genre of games associates that genre with your platform, understands that there is a healthy market for said genre on your platform, and is hence comfortable investing their time and money into this genre on your platform.
An example of this is how
Halo on the Xbox created a space for first-person shooters on that platform, which then carried over to the Xbox 360. Once the 360 hit, Microsoft made a notable effort to secure JRPGs for that platform. They funded
Tales of Vesperia, worked out agreements for
Eternal Sonata,
Infinite Undiscovery,
The Last Remnant, and so on. In essence, they tried to create a market for that genre on the Xbox 360. (Ultimately, this didn't work out for a number of reasons, but that's a separate discussion)
Now, Nintendo wasn't in the habit of doing this for a long time. For several years--basically the PS1 through the PS2--Nintendo had basically conceded the JRPG market to PlayStation. Japanese RPGs were a "Sony thing" for a multitude of reasons (including the relationship with Square Enix, Sony's shares in that company, Yamauchi's past statements, Nintendo's own lack of expertise/investment, and so on).
Once the Nintendo DS took off, though, it created the right circumstances for a number of publishers to begin releasing high quality JRPGs on it. It was a machine that didn't require an immense budget to work with. It was
the device for playing videogames in Japan and the rest of the world. Atlus and Square Enix's early support for the DS was particularly great, with the remakes of
FFIII,
FFIV, new games like
FFXII: Revenant Wings, and more. Once these games had found an audience, the presence of a healthy RPG market on the DS encouraged them and other publishers in Japan to put more RPGs on the DS, and as a result it ended up being one of the best platforms to play JRPGs on.
I believe it was around this time that Nintendo began to see the value of investing heavily in a specific genre on their platforms. They acquired Monolith Soft from Bandai Namco (and released the fantastic
Soma Bringer on DS). They went out of their way to promote the
Dragon Quest games on DS, and even handled the marketing and publishing of those games in the West. Around the same time, they had Intelligent Systems working on a [now cancelled]
Fire Emblem game for the Wii that would have represented a major change for the series. They were in discussions with Bandai Namco for
Tales support, Square Enix for
Dragon Quest X, and of course eventually there was
Xenoblade and
The Last Story.
Cut to a few years later, and I think it's safe to say that Nintendo and Sony now share the JRPG market. Sony still holds a number of "high-presentation" games like
Final Fantasy,
Persona, and
Tales on their systems, but Nintendo have made some significant strides of their own, particularly with a lot of the JRPG support that Nintendo 3DS received. (
Bravely Default,
Dragon Quest remakes, the
Shin Megami Tensei games,
Yo-kai Watch, the success of smaller-budget boutique games like
The Legend of Legacy, and of course
Fire Emblem) All in all, they've done a pretty good job of creating a space for Japanese role-playing games on their platforms and it definitely would not have happened without the investment and effort on their part. A lot of this is now carrying over to Switch.
With games like
Doom and
Skyrim and
Rocket League, Nintendo are following a similar concept. They're going after notable games that will attract a certain kind of audience to their platform, and then hoping to leverage this audience to attract more such games in turn. So, with that in mind, I think the brands they should be looking at are:
- Call of Duty - This is the obvious choice. CoD is still the biggest multiplayer first-person shooter brand, and it actually did reasonably well on both Nintendo DS and Wii. I actually firmly believe these discussions have been underway for some time and we'll see next year's Call of Duty on the Switch.
- Final Fantasy - Another very obvious choice. It has an audience on Nintendo platforms and is a successful JRPG brand, which will aid their efforts in that space. It's also a "high on presentation" game, which is important. FF15 would work here, but I think FF7 would be a much, much bigger deal. The question is when exactly the game is being released and when Sony's exclusivity arrangement for it ends.
- Assassin's Creed - This one is trickier because we don't know what compromises would need to be made to get Origins running on Switch. The main goal would be to start attracting more of these third-person action game audiences to their systems. Uncharted is obviously off the grid and I'm not certain if Tomb Raider is a big enough deal to make a real difference. That leaves us with Assassin's Creed or Witcher 3, and I think it's more likely Ubi makes that effort than CDPR.
- Diablo III - We've seen inXile say they're bringing games to Switch and the developers of Divinity 2 have expressed an interest, too. That said, I think if you want to create a market for those games you begin with Diablo. Blizzard have already done a pretty good job of optimizing Diablo III for consoles mechanically and in terms of UX. The game is also capable of running on older PCs, so Switch theoretically should do just fine.
- The Witness - They need a (relatively) high budget independently-developed game, and I think The Witness fits this requirement very well. In lieu of this, Hellblade or even Supergiant's next game would work, too. This is something they lack at the moment, even though the indie support on the eShop has been fantastic.
