I had a feeling 2019 would see considerably more 3rd party support, and less of a gap between Switch release dates and other consoles (which I believe Reggie said the gap would be closing)

2018 was definitely an improvement over 2017, but we can still do better. And 2019 will be the proof in the pudding. By 2019, The system will have been out for two years with rocksolid success. So most of those developers who started making games a year after the system launch when they saw it was legit, those games will start releasing in 2019, 2020 and 2021, depending on the development cycle.

Normally it wouldn’t take so long for third-party support to kick into gear, but Nintendo was literally starting from ground zero with this

system. Even Boobysoft didn’t have an exclusive ready for launch like they usually do. Practically every third-party developer out their had lost faith, so Nintendo had to build up their support block by block, game by game, all the while ensuring the system stayed selling like hotcakes despite not having most third party games. That’s quite the challenge. Yet they’ve done it. Had the system slowed down significantly at any point, those developers would’ve gotten cold feet and Nintendo would’ve potential lost third-party support forever, or at least the foreseeable future. I don’t know if they would’ve ever recovered from that.

I’m glad that’s not how things have turned out. They’ve done the impossible with a chicken or the egg scenario working against them. You need games to sell systems, but the developers didn’t want to put those games on the system until they saw it selling long term. Kudos to them for pulling that one off.