With retailers continuing to sell out of Nintendo Switch hardware pretty much the moment it comes into stock and Nintendo promising shipments of 10 million consoles by the end of the fiscal year, you'd think third-party publishers would be falling all over themselves to port existing and upcoming games and franchises over to Nintendo's hit system.

For the most part, you'd be wrong (so far, at least).

Sure, you can find some major multi-platform ports in the Switch's list of upcoming games. Those include ports of older titles like Skyrim and Rocket League, sports games like NBA 2K18 and FIFA 18, family titles like Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 and Just Dance 2018, and so on. And the Switch already has versions of Minecraft, NBA Playgrounds, and plenty of indie games that also appear on other consoles.

But for every upcoming major console release that is getting a Nintendo Switch port, there are just as many seemingly sticking with Microsoft's and Sony's platforms. For the most part, third-party publishers are still treating the Switch version of their biggest games as a completely optional addition to the "big two" console options.

We need more power

Part of the reason is raw horsepower, as Asobo Studios' Chief Creative Officer made explicitly clear when talking about the upcoming A Plague Tale: Innocence in a GamingBolt interview.

“No. I will not lie by just saying... power. It's really the power of the device. In this case it was the amount of rats we need to display. We already know that there's too many rats, too many animations, too many AI at the same time. And if we want to give justice to – it’s like there is a large bridge between [it and] Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro. And the Switch, it was too hard to make the same game in such a different context.”

A lack of hardware power is probably why games like Middle-Earth: Shadows of War and Raiders of the Broken Planet are skipping the Switch. It could also explain why Activision says Call of Duty: WWII won't be coming to the Nintendo Switch, though perhaps leftover bitterness over the memory of weak sales for Call of Duty: Black Ops II on the Wii U have something to do with that.

But the horsepower excuse doesn't work for every game that is skipping the Switch. Titles like Mega Man Legacy Collection and South Park: The Fractured but Whole don't seem like they would tax the low-powered Switch hardware, but neither game has any plans for Nintendo's system. Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer isn't that much more technically complex than FIFA, but while EA's soccer series is coming to the Switch this year, Konami's is not.

A delayed reaction?

Perhaps the success of the Switch simply caught some of these publishers unaware, so projects that were already well underway when the system launched aren't able to turn on a dime with an eye toward a Switch port. If that's the case, we could see these publishers changing plans so that more games set to release in 2018 and beyond are built with the Switch audience in mind (though the hardware power issue will still limit some of these ports).

Maybe publishers aren't convinced that a Switch version will earn them very many new sales, especially if those Switch owners also own another platform that is getting a version of the game. The Switch's hybrid form factor can easily make any ported game more appealing, though, so I wouldn't write off the value of making a new version even for a "secondary" system.

Nintendo doesn't necessarily need Switch versions of the most popular games from other platforms for the console to succeed long term. At some point, though, if the Switch continues its run on the market, you'd expect publishers to at least try to adapt their major franchises to the new audience like they did for the Wii. This could lead to a kind of virtuous cycle of new games leading to hardware sales leading to new games, eventually making the Switch a system that's too big for gaming's biggest franchises to ignore.