First, for the vast majority of games, Nintendo isn’t the developer so they’re not patching them at all.
There are 12,500+ games in the eShop. The vast majority of these do not have active development teams. Any indie game you see on there was likely ported by the publisher, not the dev, who doesn’t have access to a devkit. I would guesstimate that less than 10% of these games have someone with access to the code and the financial resources to devote to additional development.
Developing an NVN2 version means a new post-processing pipeline, a new shader architecture, a new antialiasing solution, a new 64 bit clean compiler tool chain. Even if the development work is fairly easy, this is a massive bug surface. You’ll need a full QA cycle.
Not to mention that if you want to do an NG update, for at least some games you’ll want to update art assets, rebuild your lighting pipeline to use ray tracing, and change texture and geometry formats to use the compression hardware.
…or you could do this. Replace
C++:
frameCap(30);
resMax("720p");
With
C++:
try {
//this always fails on NX
HOS::setBcMode(ENHANCED);
frameCap(60);
resMax("1080p");
}
catch (Exception ex) {
frameCap(30);
resMax("720p");
}
And just rebuild as a Switch 1 app, no fuss, no muss. You only have one version of the code to maintain, it takes a developer 20 minutes to do, and lets you submit a single version of the game to the eShop which will work on both systems.
This is much lower cost, but can result in a spike in sales, without precluding a next gen port coming later.
This is
roughly the PS4 Pro strategy, where developers had multiple paths to use the extra power of the hardware without having to rebuild their rendering pipeline for checkerboard 4K. It’s how Sony was able to launch with so many “enhanced” games. If they’d required full rebuilds that list would have been tiny.
Now, it’s possible Nintendo skips this route. But I think customers would be unhappy to get a New Switch that doesn’t run
Doom 2016 any better than before. I think devs would be unhappy that they essentially need a full port to take advantage of the hardware, after already investing in expensive, hyper optimized, ultra compromised Switch ports. And I think Nintendo would be unhappy with developers being slow to support the new hardware.
Opening up a low-cost, “boost mode” solution would nicely solve all three of these problems, and cost Nintendo themselves very little to develop.
