Overwatch on the Nintendo Switch would be ‘very challenging,’ says game’s director

Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan recently took questions about the game on Reddit, and a fan brought up the possibility of seeing the game on the Nintendo Switch. Kaplan’s answer doesn’t leave much hope, but it shows that Nintendo’s latest system is at least on Blizzard’s radar.

“I'm loving the Switch!” Kaplan wrote. “My second favorite gaming platform of all time is the 3DS. Getting [Overwatch] on the Switch is very challenging for us. But we're always open minded about exploring possible platforms.”

What does that mean, exactly?

The Nintendo Switch isn’t the most powerful console on the market by a pretty significant margin, but Overwatch doesn’t require much in the way of system specs to be playable. So it’s possible that he doesn’t mean it would be challenging to get the game onto the Switch in terms of performance, but that’s likely at least part of the story.

The other challenge is the fact that Nintendo isn’t launching its for-pay online service until fall of this year, and it’s unknown how well the eventual service would work with competitive online games like Overwatch. It’s possible that Blizzard itself doesn’t have many details about what Nintendo is planning with online support, or that the details the company does have about Nintendo’s plan aren’t a good fit with the requirements of a game like Overwatch.

The dream of playing Overwatch on a portable is pretty exciting, and Blizzard has a large incentive to make it happen if the Switch continues to sell well, but we’re not quite willing to start holding our breath yet.