The Nintendo Switch’s complicated legacy with indie games

The first several months after Nintendo released the Switch in 2017 have been described as a "gold rush" for independent game developers. The Switch's eShop wasn't exactly barren, but early on there was a lot of room for new releases. To put it into perspective, Nintendo announced in 2018 that around 1,000 games were added to the platform in its first year or so. The number of games released each year just adds to the number of games available on the eShop; in 2024, GameDiscoverCo reported that 50 games were added per week, leading to more than 2,300 new games in 2024 by November.

What started as a gold rush for indie developers eventually flattened, pushing some developers to the margins, while platform degradation soured the experience as a whole.

Coming out of the so-called indiepocalypse, the period after the indie golden age from 2008 to 2015 - think Fez, Braid, and Super Meat Boy - developers were reeling from the massive influx of competition and a decline in discoverability. The eShop, for some time, was a reprieve to that. Nintendo itself seemed poised to support that period of growth; days ahead of the Switch's launch date, the company announced that it had already loc …

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