The best console ever made? (Nintendo)
Nintendo’s current console has more games on it than the PlayStation 4 and 5 put together, but also the best record of quality on Metacritic.
In the modern era of gaming. you can usually guarantee two things about a Nintendo console: that it will feature a number of highly acclaimed first party exclusive games, and that it probably won’t have many top titles made by third party publishers. After all, no one expects the latest Grand Theft Auto or Call Of Duty on a Nintendo console (not that both haven’t happened occasionally).
People happily buy the Nintendo Switch knowing that many games available on the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 4 will never appear on it, but that doesn’t mean that, overall, the Switch has less games. In fact, surprisingly, the opposite is true.
A fan has added up all the games available on Switch and discovered it has an incredible 11,555 games. That’s more than any other previous console, including the PlayStation 4 and 5 combined, the PlayStation 1 through 3, and all Xbox consoles including backwards compatibility.
If you’re wondering how that can be, it’s because the Switch has become a haven for indie games – many of which sell better or are only released on Nintendo’s console (and usually PC).
It’s also due to a lot of what can only be described as shovelware: low quality games thrown onto the eShop with little care on the side of the creators and with no attempts at curation from Nintendo.
The Last Of Us knock-off that Sony insisted be removed from the eShop is one of the few famous examples, with most of the others being sub-mobile style rubbish no one’s ever heard of.
What is a first party video game?
The term first party means any game that is both published by a console manufacturer (i.e. Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft) and made by a developer which they own. The term is somewhat nebulous though as it’s also sometimes applied to games which the console manufacturer publishes but is made by an outside developer – especially if the console manufacturer owns the rights to the franchise in question, as with, for example, Stellar Blade.
Third party game is the term used for titles made by independent publishers (the likes of EA, Ubisoft and Bandai Namco) which are not owned by a console manufacturer.
Second party is more of an unofficial term, used to refer to developers who make all or most of their games for a specific format, such as Insomniac Games before Sony bought them.
The original observation was made on the forum ResetEra, using data from Mobygames and DekuDeals, which highlighted some small inconsistences between the two sources.
Forum member St. Eam the 3rd found that while Windows PC has by far the largest library, at 66,569 games, that’s because its backwards compatibility stretches all the way back to 1993.
The Switch’s total though is comparable to …read more
Source:: Metro
