A Plague Tale dev blames spec deficit for lack of Switch port

The Nintendo Switch’s comparative technical weakness compared to its competitors is to blame for the fact that indie title A Plague Tale: Innocence will not be appearing on the system.

That’s according to developer Asobo Studio, which has revealed that the game’s publisher Focus Home Interactive has told them to concentrate their efforts elsewhere.

It’s really the power of the device,” chief creative officer David Dedeine told GamingBolt. 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.

There is a large bridge between Switch, Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro. And the Switch, it was too hard to make the same game in such a different context.”

Dedeine explained that the decision was made prior to any attempt to get the game up and running, adding: We’ve done the math, and had all sorts of discussions with Focus Home Interactive. So maybe will try, but right now the discussion we’ve had with the publisher was to not make Switch a priority.”

Certainly on paper the Switch struggles to maintain ground with current market rivals PS4 and Xbox One. Nintendo’s machine is powered by a 1020MHz Nvidia Tegra chip. This compares to the 1.75GHz and 1.6GHz 8-core AMD Jaguar processors found in the Xbox One and PS3.

The GPU comparison is even less kind. Switch has a 768MHz Tegra GPU that actually downclocks to around 307MHz when undocked. The PS4 has a 800MHz GPU and the Xbox One 853MHz. Switch also has only half the RAM of the other two machines – 4GB.

This of course does not take into account the increased performance of the PS4 Pro (2.1GHz 8-Core CPU, 4.2TF of GPU performance) or the Xbox One X (2.3GHz 8-Core and 6TF).