I agree with what you're saying.
But in regards to the Switch, I think Nintendo has been spending a lot of money to secure exclusives. It's just a question of whether fans are happy with the exclusives that Nintendo is getting.
Daemon x Machina from Marvelous Games.
Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle from Ubisoft
Octopath Traveler from Square Enix
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 from Activision
Bayonetta 3 from PlatinumGames and Sega.
Travis Strikes Back: No More Heroes from Suda51.
Nintendo even secured a 1 year temporary exclusivity deal over Super Bomberman R.
You mention, for example, Link appearing in Soul Calibur 2. We recently had Star Fox in the Switch version of Ubisoft's Starlink: Battle for Atlas.
I'm happy with the variety of exclusives and number, it's just what sucks to me personally is that most of them feel like cheaper lower budget games vs the AAA scale games like Spiderman, Quantum Break, Bloodborne, Detroit, etc. With the exception of Mario+Rabbids, and probably Bayonetta 3, Ocotpath, DxM, most of them feel small scale like they don't have as much ambition to them
I need that big budget Switch game because a lot of its exclusive lineup looks like AA scale games with some just luckily selling AAA level sales if that makes any sense. It gets tiring looking at almost every upcoming Switch game and thinking "Eh it looks alright I guess. Kinda cheap looking." This feeling even leaks into many of Nintendo's first party games. I thought LM3 was a Luigi's Mansion 3DS up port at first because of how average it looked visually. I should not have felt that way for the Luigi's Mansion 3 reveal trailer, a sequel to a game that sold like 4-5ish million copies. Same goes for Fire Emblem though I can excuse that for being their first HD FE but still. It looked pretty average at E3, like a ps3/360 game. Even worse for MUA3 which looks pretty dang cheap during gameplay segments. Also why does it feel like every Switch game reveal has framerate problems? No other system or publisher has those issues but Switch has it constantly. It just makes the system look terrible. The only 3rd party exclusive for the Switch that I thought looked amazing and high quality was M+R. It had the visuals, the framerate, the scale and budget to showcase what the Switch can do. Octopath looked exactly as beautiful as it should with the Switch hardware. Most other things make the Switch look like a portable 360 which we know it can do better.
MUA3, XC2, FE Three Houses, even FF Crystal Chronicles HD which is an HD port had atrocious framerate problems in its footage in the direct. It's like publishers don't care about what their game looks like on Switch because people have lower standards or it's a lower priority but on any other system they try to make their games look clean and smooth upon first showcase. Maybe I'm weird thinking this way.
