Respawn overcoming challenges, making changes to Apex Legends on Nintendo Switch

By Aaron Mamiit Published April 25, 2023

Apex Legends is already looking good on the Nintendo Switch, as developer Respawn Entertainment is hard at work in bringing the team-based battle royale shooter to the hybrid console.

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At EA Play Live 2020, publisher Electronic Arts revealed that Apex Legends will arrive to the Nintendo Switch this fall, in addition to activating cross-play for the game and unveiling the Lost Treasures collection event.

Apex Legends game director Chad Grenier, in an interview with GameSpot, revealed that the Nintendo Switch port has been in the works for a while, but it appears to be coming along well.

“It’s not without its challenges, but I’ll say it’s looking really good and running very well,” Grenier said, adding that Respawn has been making some changes such as supporting the Nintendo Switch’s motion controls through a gyro aim function.

“We’re testing it at this point, making sure that it’s good to go. It’s worth it,” Grenier added.

Grenier re-confirmed that cross-play will be among the features of the Nintendo Switch version of Apex Legends, giving the option to participate in matches with players on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC through Origin and Steam.

The same content will also be made available on all platforms for Apex Legends, according to Grenier.

EA Play Live 2020

While EA Play Live 2020 featured highlights such as Star Wars: Squadrons and the pending addition of more Electronic Arts titles to Steam such as Titanfall 2, the event failed to provide a sneak peek into the publisher’s future, at a time when players are looking ahead to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

Digital Trends has reached out to Electronic Arts for any plans of upcoming announcements, including whether cross-play will arrive on more of its games in the near future.

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom DLC is not happening, says Nintendo

Link and other characters from Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the year's most successful games, but a developer from Nintendo has confirmed that it doesn't have plans to make any DLC for it. Speaking to the Japanese publication Famitsu, series producer Eiji Aonuma confirmed this was the case because the development team had already explored all of the ideas they wanted to in the base game and is now looking to the future.

"At this time, we are not planning to release additional content. We feel like we have already fully explored and exhausted the gameplay possibilities in this world," Aonuma said in comments translated by Video Games Chronicle. "Initially, the reason we decided to develop a sequel was because we believed there was still value in experiencing new gameplay within that particular Hyrule. If, in the future, we find a compelling reason, we may revisit that world once again. Whether it’s another sequel or an entirely new title, I believe the next game will offer a completely new experience."
While Aonuma's explanation is sound, it's still a pretty surprising move by Nintendo. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild received two expansions after it came out in 2017. Some fans expected that Tears of the Kingdom would follow in that game's footsteps, especially as it would make sense for Nintendo to find more ways to capitalize on a game that has already sold 18.51 million copies. Still, it's probably best for Nintendo to move on from Tears of the Kingdom and create something new rather than making underwhelming DLC for the sake of having post-launch content.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now for Nintendo Switch.

Gaming

This hidden Switch feature will change the way you play Nintendo games

Two players play Nintendo Switch.

Any time I discuss the latest Switch game with my friends, I usually hear the same critique: “I wish I could remap the controls.” Major Switch exclusives like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Metroid Dread are seriously lacking in control customization, which can be frustrating if your brain has a specific idea of what a gamepad layout is.

There’s a fairly good excuse as to why those games don’t include controller customization options, though. It's because of a system-level controller remap option tucked deep away in the Nintendo Switch’s settings menu. If you didn’t know that existed (as few of my friends seem to), get ready for a solution to all your control issues that’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.

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Don’t expect Zelda’s $70 price to become the new Switch standard, says Nintendo

Link looks at his hand in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years.
While Nintendo will release Tears of Kingdom at $70, a spokesperson for the company tells Digital Trends that this will not always be the case for its first-party games going forward.
"No," the spokesperson said when Digital Trends asked if this is a new standard. "We determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis."
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Official Trailer #2
To get more insight into the price shift, I spoke to Omdia Principal Analyst George Jijiashvili, who explains what has caused the price of games to go up in recent years and how Tears of the Kingdom demonstrates that Nintendo will "remain flexible about first-party title pricing." Ultimately, Nintendo fans are finally starting to feel the impact of inflation that's been sweeping across the game industry, even if it's only "on a case-by-case basis" for now.
The price is right
Nintendo claims that not every one of its significant first-party game will be $70, and we can actually already see that in action. Preorders just went live for Pikmin 4, which launches on July 21, after Tears of the Kingdom, and it only costs $60. Still, Zelda's price tag indicates that going forward, Nintendo will at least consider raising the price of its most anticipated games to $70. But why start with Tears of the Kingdom?
When asked why it chose Tears of the Kingdom as its first $70 Nintendo Switch game, a Nintendo spokesperson simply reiterated that the company will "determine the suggested retail price for any Nintendo product on a case-by-case basis." Still, it's a surprising choice for Nintendo to make that pricing change to just one exclusive game almost six years into the Switch's life span. Jijiashvili thinks the choice to do this with Tears of the Kingdom was a pretty apparent one for Nintendo, although it won't apply to everything going forward.
"If you are going to make a game $70, it's going to be the follow-up to one of your most critically acclaimed and bestselling games ever," Jijiashvili tells Digital Trends. "I don’t think that this means that $70 will become the standard price for all major Nintendo releases. It's worth noting that Metroid Prime Remastered is priced at $40. It's clear that Nintendo will remain flexible about first-party title pricing."

It makes basic financial sense for Nintendo to ask for a little bit more for a game it knows will be one of the biggest releases of 2023. But what factors in the game industry and world's economy at large caused Nintendo to make this decision?
Priced Out
For more than a decade, people got comfortable with AAA video games being priced at $60. Of course, there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but it was seen as an industry standard until the dawn of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Publisher 2K was one of the first to announce a price increase, and companies like EA, Sony, and Microsoft have all followed suit. Jijiashvili chalks this up to inflation-related pressure on game publishers.
"The games industry has already been experiencing a lot of inflationary pressure," he explains. "AAA games are much more expensive to make now than they used to be, but prices have actually been declining in inflation-adjusted terms -- if prices had risen with inflation since 1990, they would now be over $90. On top of that, we’ve had a big burst of general inflation, meaning that publishers are looking at big increases in everything from salaries to tools. It’s going to be really hard for most publishers to avoid passing on all those extra costs at some point."
Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened.