It's a joke, no need to jump to defend anything. I'll admit full fault for fucking around instead of having an actual discussion, but you aren't exactly promoting discussion either. Lets just chill out a bit.
Oh? Would you care to elaborate on why it "seems" hard to develop for? Full disclosure, I'm not a game developer so this is a genuine question. Not trying to be sarcastic here.
One of the hardest things about multiplatform game development is nailing the performance and compatibility with multiple platforms. This is exhasperated when you have to work with different sets of architecture and capabilities.
One of the biggest breakthroughs this generation has been that the PS4 and the XB1 are so similar (And, likewise, similiar to the PC Architecture).
In terms of the APIs, generally speaking, the PS4 and XB1 are fairly similar. Obviously they're different in terms of how the APIs are implemented, and there's still a challenge when working on a multiplatform game on those platforms, but, essentially, they support the same feature set and have relatively similar performance.
Nintendo, on the other hand, (at least so far) has not managed to provide the same level of support or feature parity. Their platforms have been revolutionary in some aspects, but down right archaic in others. I would highly doubt that, out of the gate, the switch has a development environment that is as rich, supportive, and feature complete as these two platforms, especially considering that they are built upon 3 generations of improvements. (The OG Xbox is the start of the "modern game console").
While it is likely that popular engines like UE4 and Unity will support Switch out of the gate, Unity, for instance, wasn't _really_ ready for PS4/XB1 support until quite a bit into the generation.
To state that porting to Switch is the easiest out of the two is down right laughable. That's simply not possible. Porting from what? One of the two platforms that are virtually identical when it comes to hardware and have basically the same first party features?
Then, there's the hardware capabilities. Even outside of architecture, the switch is a far less capable platform, which would require different assets, rendering modes and file sizes.
Supporting the handheld mode as well isn't just going to work. That's not how game development works. You don't just (excuse me!) flip a
switch and the game just works in a lower setting. This requires additional optimization and performance targets, metrics, and work. It does't come free.
We can also talk about the controllers... but It's not really nessecary. We can assume third party ports will, for the most part, only support the "full/pro" controller experience, as very few games will be playable with only 1 joystick.
I'm not hating on the Switch, I'll probably have one day one. My passion about playing pokemon on a TV can't be contained.
Just need to keep realism in check and not take the words of an "analyst" as gold here. Lets wait and see the games.
