Given the mitigating factors, a port of the original Red Dead Redemption might be more feasible, if not quite as profitable.In addition to giving him a platform, Patankar views Spotify as a collaborator. It would also definitely come out probably long after the online service finally makes its debut: enough time for the developer and publisher to know what they're getting in to. If it did happen, however, it would likely be far enough out of Red Dead Redemption 2's launch window to avoid pulling focus, because I have to imagine plenty of potential GTA buyers on the Switch also have a larger console, and while 2K would no doubt farm out the port it would likely still pull some resources from the mothership. And there's no doubt it would sell well - GTA always sells well, and here we have an opportunity to seel it both to new customers and to sell it to old customers a second, third or fourth time.
Again, 2K's enthusiasm for porting older GTA games to iOS does indicate a certain flexibility here. I'm not going to call this one impossible. This feels like the biggest potential minefield for a port. This one is a big question mark, and you can bet 2K isn't going to release another version of GTA 5 without an ironclad confidence that GTA Online will work perfectly. And that's user-facing: Nintendo has never had the best reputation for online services, even if Rocket League is working just fine. We've heard precious few details on what it will entail in the time since launch, and what we have heard isn't what you would call encouraging: a simple feature like voice chat requires a separate smartphone with a specialized app and a sea of dongles to accompany them both. If Rockstar decided to port GTA 5 to any new platforms, surely the primary reason would be to extend the reach of GTA Online.Īnd that's the tricky bit: Nintendo's online services are still a mystery. That's what GTA 5 is at this point, essentially: it's the reason that the game remains a near-mythical cash cow for 2K now years after release, it's the reason why we never saw any single-player DLC for the base game, and it's been the development focus for the team for a long time now. But the real sticking point here would be GTA Online. Storage space is the first problem that leaps to mind: an unaugmented Switch has an anemic 32 gb internal hard drive, which is likely too small for any GTA 5 port - the current 32 GB game cartridge size would also probably fall short, with 64 GB cartridges delayed until 2019.
It would be far from the first time we've seen GTA on the go - iOS has plenty of older games, and the PSP and DS's Chinatown Wars is a fan favorite - but it's easy to imagine it could be the best portable GTA yet.
But on a basic level, it feels like it would be possible to get this game up and running on the portable, if perhaps not perfectly. Noire, which did, in fact, come out on Switch, and there would seem to be some sticking points here. Eurogamer's Digital Foundry did an extensive analysis based on Rockstar's L.A. This game first released on the Xbox 360 and PS3, after all, and the Switch should be able to handle anything that those ancient consoles were capable of. And from a technical perspective, it should work. The prospect of GTA inside of the typical family-friendly Nintendo ecosystem feels like a white elephant, but I wouldn't be worried on that front: if we can have DOOM, surely we can have GTA. It's a tantalizing rumor because it feels like it might actually be possible.