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Nintendo really wanted to encourage indie gaming on the Switch, so any individual can register to be an authorized developer: https://developer.nintendo.com/ ht

Nintendo really wanted to encourage indie gaming on the Switch, so any individual can register to be an authorized developer: https://developer.nintendo.com/ https://developer.nintendo.com/.

weinzierl 3y ago
I saw that initially and was encouraged, but my further research suggests that you need to buy a development kit about which I could find virtually no info. I can only assume that it is expensive.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  It’s not going to be crazy but you should expect to spend like a $1000 total for everything and have a real company set up
- nogridbag 3y ago
  It looks like a Switch dev kit is only ~$450 from Googling. I believe dev kits in the past were far much expensive.
  - troupo 3y ago
    This is the insanity I don't understand. Developing for desktop systems is essentially free. Developing for iOS devices is $99 a year (plus store commission) for literally anyone. Developing for consoles? Oh, you have to be a business entity, you have to pass approval process, you have to buy a dev kit, you have to... And then also pay a commission.
    - 3836293648 3y ago
      It's because they want(ed) to keep a higher standard of quality on their store and keep homebrewers and cheaters away.
      - mh- 3y ago
        I believe you're right, but the first part didn't work. The Switch eShop has an incredible amount of shovelware.
        3836293648 3y ago
        Hence the want(ed).
    - ammar2 3y ago
      > Developing for iOS devices is $99 a year (plus store commission) for literally anyone. Don't forget having to buy a MacOS device in this equation.
      - helboi4 3y ago
        Yeah that's pretty prohibitive for most people who couldn't spare $450 for a switch dev kit
      - troupo 3y ago
        I bought an XBox, too.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        Develop on a Hackintosh (either bare metal or VM, there's more than enough guides for both), build using Github Actions, and that's it. If you want to stay fully legit, rent a Mac instance from AWS or the myriad "Mac-as-a-Service" companies and be done with it.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Thank US 1983 crash for that. Gatekeeping is a way to avoid a minium level of quality, instead of a dumpster copy cat trash that inudates all the stores where there is no control. Want to learn how to do consoles? Get a toy handeld using ESP32 or Arduino.
      - anthk 3y ago
        PC gaming had tons of shovelware since the beginning and even got both good propietary and libre software games with great quality. So did the Game Boy, which the NIntendo seal of quality was almost given for free because lots of games were junk even under the GBC era.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Exactly because anyone can do it.
        anthk 3y ago
        Then explain some "games" for the Game Boy Color where the quality was very subpar.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        You said it yourself, Nintendo platform bouncers let too many spoil the party. Here is the thing, we aren't entitled to anything in life. Don't like the way consoles work? Don't buy them.
        dvdkon 3y ago
        > Here is the thing, we aren't entitled to anything in life. Are you sure about that? I'm entitled to a lot of things if my country's laws are anything to go by, for some reasonable definition of entitlement. I could be entitled to running my own software on a Switch if lawmakers say so. The EU already forced Apple, so what's another platform?
    - amalcon 3y ago
      A chunk of it is copy protection. Dev devices can necessarily run software not signed by the manufacturer, which means copy protection can be bypassed using PC-like methods and loaded to a dev device. Thus, they want to make sure the dev device is not the device that most consumers purchase. I think it's a poor tradeoff for such a locked down environment, and anti-educational at that. Obviously console manufacturers have a different opinion on the matter.
      - gjsman-1000 3y ago
        It's a little more complicated than that. Dev devices are typically physically different - containing debug lines and connections that are not present in retail. The Switch itself has 2 different types of dev console: One that looks very much like retail, and another that is about 4x as thick and has every port under the sun. Secondly, these consoles are physically fused differently. Instead of having retail encryption keys burned into the SoC, they have custom keys issued to the developer installed. This means dev consoles cannot run retail software for lack of a key to decrypt it - but they will decrypt, and run, anything the developer signs. Both of these things are physical modifications, ultimately. Dev consoles, thus, do not come off the same production line as retail; but are customized and modified devices with their own manufacturing process. That's not cheap. Sure, the Xbox does get away with the retail console having a "Dev Mode." That's a testament to the Xbox's security having gone 12 years without a crack. Making physically different retail and developer consoles is a much safer solution for anyone who isn't Xbox.
        Nullabillity 3y ago
        You're starting at the wrong end. There is no need for there to be a separate "dev console".
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Xbox One/Series has Dev Mode, but that's only for UWP apps which have severe resource restrictions. If you want to use the Dedicated partition you need a devkit. The reasons why consoles lock down developer access so hard is because those interfaces are also very useful for piracy. On iOS, because you can get access to developer tools, you can use AltStore to sign arbitrary binaries with your own dev key[0]. Apple may have said "sideloading is a cybercriminal's best friend", but what they meant is "you're all going to steal iOS apps if we let the general public install software without DRM"[1]. The old Microsoft "Darknet" paper[3] built up a sort of theory of piracy, which I still find useful to invoke here. In the paper, they break the piracy ecosystem down into five pieces: 1. Rippers, who pirate new works and make them available 2/5. Seeders, who transmit new works across the network[4] 3. Players that are capable of rendering creative works 4. Indexes that provide information as to where pirated works can be found To stop piracy, you need to block at least one of these steps. For a variety of reasons, legal action against any of these actors is difficult. Players and indexes are identifiable, meaning we can sue them, but they have legitimate, non-pirate-y uses. Rippers and seeders are hard to conclusively identify, making them impossible to sue. Of course, when people using the power of the state cannot identify criminals, they revert to collective punishment - or in this case, technical restrictions. You can't DRM the seeders or the indexes, but you can encrypt the media, which gives legal leverage over player vendors: either make your player enforce our licensing terms or do not play our media. But there's still a problem: players can still play unprotected media. Rippers will just strip the DRM and release unprotected data that will play anywhere. This is why the RIAA fought tooth-and-nail to ban DRM-free DAT and MP3 players, and only settled for legal restrictions on DRM removal. Console manufacturers have the advantage that each new console is it's own medium - they can just make players that only play DRM-encumbered work, and then nobody can pirate anything, even if rippers strip the DRM. Hell, even if people jailbreak the players - you control the supply of players, so you can ensure whatever updates you use to 'prevent tampering' are installed before the user even gets to the console. And this is far cheaper than working on new obfuscations that some socially maladjusted loner will break in a few days. [0] At least, if you trust Riley Testut with your iCloud account password. [1] In general, people who want to enforce copyright rarely, if ever, come out and say it. The public is generally unsympathetic to copyright owners. It's easier to conflate security of their work from copying with security of your data. [3] https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/darknet.pdf https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/da... [4] In the original Darknet paper, this was broken down into 'transmission' and 'caching'. This division makes sense for the FTP topsite scene, but not BitTorrent trackers.
    - cableshaft 3y ago
      Also you have to pay to get your game rated by the ESRB (at least if it's physical. Maybe not required to pay money for digital games from what I'm seeing with a Google search? Although we had digital games we still got ESRB rated). It's been more than a decade since I worked on a console game, but I think at the time that cost us $750.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    "only" If it's to dev a game with your kid, that pricey. Pricier than the console itself. Pricier than to dev for android or iphone, or any laptop. Or the steam deck for that matter. Expensive dev kits made sense for devs 20 years ago, but today they are just a way to lock the ecosystem.
    - gjsman-1000 3y ago
      You’re kidding right? $450 for a dev kit is a steal compared to older console generations, which were thousands of dollars per device. Also, I think it is completely fair for Nintendo to think: If you won’t spare even $450 for a dev kit, there’s no way we want your game. By the way, consider what a Switch regularly costs: $299. You are paying Nintendo only $150 for the privilege of sending you a custom, low-run, modified device that is different in both software and hardware, combined with (likely) an account representative for business and technical questions. That’s kind of cheap.
      - bjtitus 3y ago
        Won't anyone think of the giant multinational corporations instead of the kids learning to program for once.
        gjsman-1000 3y ago
        No kid is going to learn how to program in Assembly and C++, when interfacing with a custom microkernel, custom graphics API, and all of the technical requirements Nintendo demands (i.e. you must have a launch screen, loading times cannot be longer than X, read speeds cannot peak higher than Y), while cross-compiling your game and all dependencies to ARM, and precompiling all shaders ahead of time, for the Tegra X1, into your game. That's what developing for the Switch literally entails. Develop your game first and then you might get there. This is a game console, not a PC. Developing games, for better or worse, whether it should be this way or not, is an extreme privilege. Sony basically never allows individual developers to register in any capacity. Xbox does, but if you want to actually publish a game, you're going to be in for a hard time.
revjx 3y ago
It's not that easy, unfortunately - I'm a registered developer (for the Wii U) and to be 'enabled' for Switch development, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops including describing your previous experience with games development and so on. The barrier for Wii U was significantly lower thanks to the 'Nintendo Web Framework', a web tech SDK that let you build games without needing to use tooling like Unity or mess around with the more complicated SDKs Nintendo provide. You didn't need prior games dev experience to get registered for that. That said - maybe they've relaxed the criteria a bit now to give first time game devs a chance to get published on Switch.
- gs17 3y ago
  >and to be 'enabled' for Switch development, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops including describing your previous experience with games development and so on. I don't think they're that strict, there's a lot of garbage on the Switch store.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    The strictness isn't there to keep garbage off the console store. That was just Nintendo revisionism. It's there because they need to know who to sue into a crater if you use developer mode to play pirated games.
    - djmips 3y ago
      I'm not sure you can use developer mode to play pirate games but it's not out of reach I suppose. Seems like a lot of work.
      - kmeisthax 3y ago
        So, on most systems nowadays, retail software is encrypted and signed with entirely different PKI from developer applications. You would have to obtain cracked retail software first, then resign it with your own keys. This is how you run pirated iOS apps now, which is only possible because Apple hands out developer keys like candy. It'd at least be theoretically possible to do the same thing with a console devkit and decrypted games. This is also narrowly considering only the example of someone trying to pirate new releases for that given system. More broadly, the console manufacturers have class solidarity[0], and don't want you doing anything that might be a copyright violation - even if you aren't hurting them or their developers specifically. You could port over an emulator and steal older games, you could modify new games (even ones you own), or you could make fan games. They want absolutely none of that on their hardware, and the only way to guarantee that is to make sure everyone who touches a devkit is wearing contractual handcuffs. [0] Vaguely Marxist term for "these people are in the same social situation, therefore their interests are aligned"
GlickWick 3y ago
It’s extremely hard. I’ve tried to get my released games into the Switch and am rejected because I don’t have a team with console launch experience. Nintendo asks for team member resumes etc. Of course at the same time they have tons of junk in the store. It turns out the trick is to just use a publisher.

Nintendo really wanted to encourage indie gaming on the Switch, so any individual can register to be an authorized developer: https://developer.nintendo.com/ https://developer.nintendo.com/.

weinzierl 3y ago

I saw that initially and was encouraged, but my further research suggests that you need to buy a development kit about which I could find virtually no info. I can only assume that it is expensive.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
It’s not going to be crazy but you should expect to spend like a $1000 total for everything and have a real company set up
nogridbag 3y ago
It looks like a Switch dev kit is only ~$450 from Googling. I believe dev kits in the past were far much expensive.
- troupo 3y ago
  This is the insanity I don't understand. Developing for desktop systems is essentially free. Developing for iOS devices is $99 a year (plus store commission) for literally anyone. Developing for consoles? Oh, you have to be a business entity, you have to pass approval process, you have to buy a dev kit, you have to... And then also pay a commission.
  - 3836293648 3y ago
    It's because they want(ed) to keep a higher standard of quality on their store and keep homebrewers and cheaters away.
    - mh- 3y ago
      I believe you're right, but the first part didn't work. The Switch eShop has an incredible amount of shovelware.
      - 3836293648 3y ago
        Hence the want(ed).
  - ammar2 3y ago
    > Developing for iOS devices is $99 a year (plus store commission) for literally anyone. Don't forget having to buy a MacOS device in this equation.
    - helboi4 3y ago
      Yeah that's pretty prohibitive for most people who couldn't spare $450 for a switch dev kit
    - troupo 3y ago
      I bought an XBox, too.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Develop on a Hackintosh (either bare metal or VM, there's more than enough guides for both), build using Github Actions, and that's it. If you want to stay fully legit, rent a Mac instance from AWS or the myriad "Mac-as-a-Service" companies and be done with it.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Thank US 1983 crash for that. Gatekeeping is a way to avoid a minium level of quality, instead of a dumpster copy cat trash that inudates all the stores where there is no control. Want to learn how to do consoles? Get a toy handeld using ESP32 or Arduino.
    - anthk 3y ago
      PC gaming had tons of shovelware since the beginning and even got both good propietary and libre software games with great quality. So did the Game Boy, which the NIntendo seal of quality was almost given for free because lots of games were junk even under the GBC era.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Exactly because anyone can do it.
        anthk 3y ago
        Then explain some "games" for the Game Boy Color where the quality was very subpar.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        You said it yourself, Nintendo platform bouncers let too many spoil the party. Here is the thing, we aren't entitled to anything in life. Don't like the way consoles work? Don't buy them.
        dvdkon 3y ago
        > Here is the thing, we aren't entitled to anything in life. Are you sure about that? I'm entitled to a lot of things if my country's laws are anything to go by, for some reasonable definition of entitlement. I could be entitled to running my own software on a Switch if lawmakers say so. The EU already forced Apple, so what's another platform?
  - amalcon 3y ago
    A chunk of it is copy protection. Dev devices can necessarily run software not signed by the manufacturer, which means copy protection can be bypassed using PC-like methods and loaded to a dev device. Thus, they want to make sure the dev device is not the device that most consumers purchase. I think it's a poor tradeoff for such a locked down environment, and anti-educational at that. Obviously console manufacturers have a different opinion on the matter.
    - gjsman-1000 3y ago
      It's a little more complicated than that. Dev devices are typically physically different - containing debug lines and connections that are not present in retail. The Switch itself has 2 different types of dev console: One that looks very much like retail, and another that is about 4x as thick and has every port under the sun. Secondly, these consoles are physically fused differently. Instead of having retail encryption keys burned into the SoC, they have custom keys issued to the developer installed. This means dev consoles cannot run retail software for lack of a key to decrypt it - but they will decrypt, and run, anything the developer signs. Both of these things are physical modifications, ultimately. Dev consoles, thus, do not come off the same production line as retail; but are customized and modified devices with their own manufacturing process. That's not cheap. Sure, the Xbox does get away with the retail console having a "Dev Mode." That's a testament to the Xbox's security having gone 12 years without a crack. Making physically different retail and developer consoles is a much safer solution for anyone who isn't Xbox.
      - Nullabillity 3y ago
        You're starting at the wrong end. There is no need for there to be a separate "dev console".
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Xbox One/Series has Dev Mode, but that's only for UWP apps which have severe resource restrictions. If you want to use the Dedicated partition you need a devkit. The reasons why consoles lock down developer access so hard is because those interfaces are also very useful for piracy. On iOS, because you can get access to developer tools, you can use AltStore to sign arbitrary binaries with your own dev key[0]. Apple may have said "sideloading is a cybercriminal's best friend", but what they meant is "you're all going to steal iOS apps if we let the general public install software without DRM"[1]. The old Microsoft "Darknet" paper[3] built up a sort of theory of piracy, which I still find useful to invoke here. In the paper, they break the piracy ecosystem down into five pieces: 1. Rippers, who pirate new works and make them available 2/5. Seeders, who transmit new works across the network[4] 3. Players that are capable of rendering creative works 4. Indexes that provide information as to where pirated works can be found To stop piracy, you need to block at least one of these steps. For a variety of reasons, legal action against any of these actors is difficult. Players and indexes are identifiable, meaning we can sue them, but they have legitimate, non-pirate-y uses. Rippers and seeders are hard to conclusively identify, making them impossible to sue. Of course, when people using the power of the state cannot identify criminals, they revert to collective punishment - or in this case, technical restrictions. You can't DRM the seeders or the indexes, but you can encrypt the media, which gives legal leverage over player vendors: either make your player enforce our licensing terms or do not play our media. But there's still a problem: players can still play unprotected media. Rippers will just strip the DRM and release unprotected data that will play anywhere. This is why the RIAA fought tooth-and-nail to ban DRM-free DAT and MP3 players, and only settled for legal restrictions on DRM removal. Console manufacturers have the advantage that each new console is it's own medium - they can just make players that only play DRM-encumbered work, and then nobody can pirate anything, even if rippers strip the DRM. Hell, even if people jailbreak the players - you control the supply of players, so you can ensure whatever updates you use to 'prevent tampering' are installed before the user even gets to the console. And this is far cheaper than working on new obfuscations that some socially maladjusted loner will break in a few days. [0] At least, if you trust Riley Testut with your iCloud account password. [1] In general, people who want to enforce copyright rarely, if ever, come out and say it. The public is generally unsympathetic to copyright owners. It's easier to conflate security of their work from copying with security of your data. [3] https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/darknet.pdf https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/da... [4] In the original Darknet paper, this was broken down into 'transmission' and 'caching'. This division makes sense for the FTP topsite scene, but not BitTorrent trackers.
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    Also you have to pay to get your game rated by the ESRB (at least if it's physical. Maybe not required to pay money for digital games from what I'm seeing with a Google search? Although we had digital games we still got ESRB rated). It's been more than a decade since I worked on a console game, but I think at the time that cost us $750.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  "only" If it's to dev a game with your kid, that pricey. Pricier than the console itself. Pricier than to dev for android or iphone, or any laptop. Or the steam deck for that matter. Expensive dev kits made sense for devs 20 years ago, but today they are just a way to lock the ecosystem.
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    You’re kidding right? $450 for a dev kit is a steal compared to older console generations, which were thousands of dollars per device. Also, I think it is completely fair for Nintendo to think: If you won’t spare even $450 for a dev kit, there’s no way we want your game. By the way, consider what a Switch regularly costs: $299. You are paying Nintendo only $150 for the privilege of sending you a custom, low-run, modified device that is different in both software and hardware, combined with (likely) an account representative for business and technical questions. That’s kind of cheap.
    - bjtitus 3y ago
      Won't anyone think of the giant multinational corporations instead of the kids learning to program for once.
      - gjsman-1000 3y ago
        No kid is going to learn how to program in Assembly and C++, when interfacing with a custom microkernel, custom graphics API, and all of the technical requirements Nintendo demands (i.e. you must have a launch screen, loading times cannot be longer than X, read speeds cannot peak higher than Y), while cross-compiling your game and all dependencies to ARM, and precompiling all shaders ahead of time, for the Tegra X1, into your game. That's what developing for the Switch literally entails. Develop your game first and then you might get there. This is a game console, not a PC. Developing games, for better or worse, whether it should be this way or not, is an extreme privilege. Sony basically never allows individual developers to register in any capacity. Xbox does, but if you want to actually publish a game, you're going to be in for a hard time.

revjx 3y ago

It's not that easy, unfortunately - I'm a registered developer (for the Wii U) and to be 'enabled' for Switch development, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops including describing your previous experience with games development and so on. The barrier for Wii U was significantly lower thanks to the 'Nintendo Web Framework', a web tech SDK that let you build games without needing to use tooling like Unity or mess around with the more complicated SDKs Nintendo provide. You didn't need prior games dev experience to get registered for that. That said - maybe they've relaxed the criteria a bit now to give first time game devs a chance to get published on Switch.

gs17 3y ago
>and to be 'enabled' for Switch development, you need to jump through a bunch of hoops including describing your previous experience with games development and so on. I don't think they're that strict, there's a lot of garbage on the Switch store.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The strictness isn't there to keep garbage off the console store. That was just Nintendo revisionism. It's there because they need to know who to sue into a crater if you use developer mode to play pirated games.
  - djmips 3y ago
    I'm not sure you can use developer mode to play pirate games but it's not out of reach I suppose. Seems like a lot of work.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      So, on most systems nowadays, retail software is encrypted and signed with entirely different PKI from developer applications. You would have to obtain cracked retail software first, then resign it with your own keys. This is how you run pirated iOS apps now, which is only possible because Apple hands out developer keys like candy. It'd at least be theoretically possible to do the same thing with a console devkit and decrypted games. This is also narrowly considering only the example of someone trying to pirate new releases for that given system. More broadly, the console manufacturers have class solidarity[0], and don't want you doing anything that might be a copyright violation - even if you aren't hurting them or their developers specifically. You could port over an emulator and steal older games, you could modify new games (even ones you own), or you could make fan games. They want absolutely none of that on their hardware, and the only way to guarantee that is to make sure everyone who touches a devkit is wearing contractual handcuffs. [0] Vaguely Marxist term for "these people are in the same social situation, therefore their interests are aligned"

GlickWick 3y ago

It’s extremely hard. I’ve tried to get my released games into the Switch and am rejected because I don’t have a team with console launch experience. Nintendo asks for team member resumes etc. Of course at the same time they have tons of junk in the store. It turns out the trick is to just use a publisher.