Video: Why didn’t Square Enix transfer the Kingdom Hearts collection to change?

An announcement that seems to have annoyed and confused many fans during the recent Super Smash Bros. Ultimate final match broadcast was the reveal of the cloud versions of kingdom hearts for Nintendo Switch.

As much as this decision “sucks”, Nightdive Studios and Limited Run developer Modern Vintage Gamer have tried to shed some light on the decision making that could They’ve gone behind the scenes, suggesting that ports 1.5 and 2.5 would take Square Enix a lot of time, effort, and money, and that the financial return won’t necessarily be worth it.

“Getting a game like Kingdom Hearts 1.5 and 2.5 Remix for the Nintendo Switch, while it sounds like it should be a no-brainer, should be something quite achievable, especially considering that it has its roots on the PlayStation 2, as a lot of the people are will be quick to tell me, it’s actually quite a complicated project and I think what happened here is that Square Enix basically sent offers to their development partners and asked them how long this project will take to build and I think they were probably a bit surprised by the answers.

“To me, it sounds like a company over two years old and many millions of dollars that would have to be spent, probably more than the budget Square Enix is ​​looking to spend.”

If all of this wasn’t enough to account for, then there are the file size requirements for these collections, along with the price of the Switch game cartridges:

“And the other thing to keep in mind with Kingdom Hearts and we’re only talking about 1.5 and 2.5 – we haven’t even talked about Kingdom Hearts 3 yet. If you combine HD 1.5 plus 2.5 Remix together, the result is about 50GB, this is a very, very big game. And the question now is what cartridge size do we need to fit the Switch by physical and that would ultimately end up being a 64GB cartridge. and the cost to the manufacturer of those cartridges becomes very, very expensive and for good reason. “

He goes on to suggest that not all developers necessarily want to take impossible ports for the Switch, as CD Projekt did with The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt – Complete Edition:

“Before people tell me ‘CD Projekt Red and Saber Interactive were able to get The Witcher III to run on Switch, why can’t they do the same here?’ Well they absolutely can, but at the end of the day Square Enix has decided that the cost that it would basically take to pay the bill for this project to get over the line, to get a good quality version of Kingdom Hearts HD Remix 1.5. And 2.5 for Switch would be too much money, the return on investment would not be anywhere near what they were looking for. So at the end of the day, I think the decision was made to move this game to the cloud, it will make them earn more money on the front end. -end, there will be server costs and things like that to basically host the game, but I think that’s something they’ve taken into account. “

When it comes to Kingdom Hearts III, it’s not quite as straightforward as Some You might think, with MVG suggesting, there is a lot of complexity when it comes to porting Unreal Engine 4 games to the Switch, and it requires “a lot” of optimization.

“This is not a simple port by any stretch of the imagination.”

MVG has pointed out on several occasions before how he thinks the cloud will be used more and more in the future, and even goes so far as to speculate that the Ethernet port on the new Base OLED Switch may be part of future cloud plans.

“Unfortunately, these kinds of high-budget triple-A games running on other systems, seeing them on Nintendo Switch in 2021 and beyond can be a tough sell for many publishers, they may look to the cloud in the future. Ultimately, that’s what I think has happened with Square Enix and the Kingdom Hearts collection for Switch … I’d be prepared to see more of these announcements. “

What are your own thoughts on Square Enix’s decision to put its Kingdom Hearts games on the cloud, instead of transferring them?? Tell us below.