It looks like Nintendo have finished testing every game.
Summary:
| category | count | percentage |
|---|---|---|
| cannot be used | 6 | ≈ 0.04% |
| issues that prevent progress or startup issues | 162 | ≈ 1.07% |
| issues that have been resolved, or are planned to be | 185 | ≈ 1.22% |
| require JoyCon 1 | 10 | ≈ 0.07% |
| no known issues | ≈ 14759 | ≈ 97.60% |
| total | ≈15122 | 100% |
Its a pretty good outcome but the games with “resolved” issues are not all good news.
Some examples (all from different games):
- Remaining on the title screen for 30 seconds will cause an error to trigger and the game will close. Please navigate away from the title screen before the error occurs.
- Inputting a particular sequence of controls in a stage may on rare occasion cause the game to close.
- Slowdown may occur in some parts of the game
- Screen distortion may occur in some parts of the game
- When Nintendo Switch 2 players battle Nintendo Switch players online, Nintendo Switch players’ character models will have distorted textures.
Still, if they have identified these issues it says a fair bit about how though their testing was.
I’ve had Wolfenstein Youngblood freeze several times so the list is not 100% accurate. But I appreciate the improved resolution and frame rate.
I was skeptical about how complete this effort would be, but I’ll admit when I’m wrong. I’ve got to say that Nintendo has impressed me with their thoroughness and the fact that they completed this audit by launch. It must have been an enormous undertaking.
15K games is a lot to test thoroughly, for sure.
I’m sure they have some kind of CI/CD pipeline that can run any game through a gamut of automated tests. They let it rip on a development switch or SDK that has access to the whole software repo and spit out the results in a CSV, with human investigation on games that flag negatively.
Hah. Sure. So does everybody else, even the games that launch on absolute fire.
Some of the stuff in the broken/to be corrected file is fairly intricate. They almost certainly didn’t flag a handful of corrupted textures or a crash in later levels in a game via that process.
Best guess they got all of these tested manually to some degree. There’s a decent chance that they got in touch with teams who had dev kits and asked them to self-report issues, too, but who knows how much testing was in-house and how much contributed by third party publishers. Either way it’s a TON of games to go through, even to hook for automation.
I had to know what 6 games did not work and it’s like one game and…I know two of those streaming services! Interesting.
They haven’t put every game that doesn’t work there. Crypt of the Necrodancer is unplayable right now, doesn’t pass initial loading.
The Nintendo 3DS is got three separate CPUs just to guarantee perfect backwards compatibility, and this shit console can’t work with a pretty much identical architecture from a few years ago?
What’s even the point of buying a console over a PC if there are caveats to the software that will work? The entire point of a console is that if a game exists for it, it can run it. Not “1.07% of them boot but can’t be played!”
