None of the evidence you've given can be used as a definitive indication that something will come, so I don't believe that getting your hopes up for future support is a good idea.
I'm not providing evidence. There's no evidence to provide, for either of us. I am laying out my expectations.
What else was I supposed to take away from "March 2020 is a year from now. I'm talking about the lifetime of the Switch?" but the idea that you were talking about potential support for after that date?
It wasn't me that brought up a date. What happens if ACIII is the only AC game on Switch in March 2020 but the Ezio Trilogy on on the release calendar for April 2020? I'm not getting hung up on arbitrary dates and I suggest you don't either.
As for when I 'expect' to see the results, now is definitely that time because that's what I've been told many times in the past
Perhaps I need to be blunt to move past this point swiftly: I don't give a shit what other people told you about other games in other conversations. I'm not them. You are not talking to those people now. I am not answerable for - or interested in discussing - random things that random people said.
it's been over 2 years since the Switch came onto the scene.
Yes. And I've explained already, that isn't a particularly useful frame of reference for development time. A major publisher deciding to commit resources to the Switch in late 2017 or early 2018 would only be starting to produce results now, or may still not produce results until later. The 2019 big-name release line-up on PS4 and Xbox One is the result of development started in 2017 or 2016 or earlier. The games that tend to have the shortest development lifetimes are indie games and ports/remasters of older games, and I think most people would agree that there's no shortage of those on Switch.
However, to go back to the point, which is Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed III, what we have there is the first Assassin's Creed release in the lifetime of the Switch that the Switch can actually hope to run, and it's been ported to the Switch.
Ubisoft was releasing their biggest games on the notoriously-difficult PS3 months after release and they were releasing big titles for the Wii U at launch and they released AC4 around/near launch on current-gen platforms (and Wii U); I simply don't believe that the Switch is such an insanely difficult platform to develop for that it would take over 2 years (going by your 'lifetime' remark which seems to exclude 2019 from the equation) to see the fruits of the labour that comes from 3rd party support.
I think you misremember. Initial Ubisoft games on PS3 were delayed by months. Their first PS3 game - Blazing Angels - was released a month after the PS3's launch (which was 9 months after the Xbox 360 version). The sequel, Blazing Angels 2, released in 2007, two months after the Xbox 360 version. Splinter Cell: Double Agent released 5 months after the Xbox 360 version, and was the last version to come out (even the Wii version released before it). Rainbow Six: Vegas released 7 months after the Xbox 360 version.
And yeah, they released ACIV at launch of the PS4. How could they not? They'd had years to prepare for it and the machine was many times more powerful than it needed to be to run that game.
Switch isn't "insanely difficult" to develop for. What it is, though, is a less powerful machine than its contemporary competitors, and architecturally quite different to everything that Assassin's Creed has run on before. It's more powerful than the older machines that Assassin's Creed ran on last generation, but different enough that porting isn't a simple task, and ACIII is the kind of game most likely to challenge the Switch, being a big open-world CPU-driven game packed full of different, occasionally interacting systems.
The Switch isn't a lead platform for this and, to me, that isn't something that we should forgive so easily.
I don't see this as anything to forgive. What's wrong if there are games where the Switch is a secondary platform? Do you expect Switch to be a lead platform for every single game that appears on it, regardless of the difficulty of developing that game, regardless of irregularities in the development timetable, regardless of the risk involved in a Switch release?
I do admit that I don't know much about development (though not due to your condescension on the matter)
I'm not being condescending. I wanted to make a quick point about game development (that game development can be messy and have unforeseen delays and obstacles) and in order to make that point I either had to assume that you had no knowledge and explain things to you, or assume you had some knowledge. I chose the second option. That's...almost the opposite of condescension.
