Larian Studios chief executive officer Swen Vincke has recently made indications that the prospect of Baldur’s Gate 3 making it to Nintendo’s hardware is highly improbable and that the decision has already gone out of the developer’s hands. Despite the immense success of the RPG on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, the technical and legal path toward a “Switch 2” port for the title appears more and more to be obstructed by exterior factors than limited by hardware constraints.
The main trouble comes from the fact that Dungeons & Dragons owns the underlying rights in intellectual property. While Larian developed and published the title to much acclaim, the license that backs it belongs to Wizards of the Coast, which is a subsidiary of Hasbro. Recent remarks from Vincke on Reddit indicate that there has been a power shift in the distribution decisions regarding the game in the future. Having completed planned updates and abandoned the D&D franchise in favor of new projects, Larian essentially lacks unilateral authority over greenlighting any new ports or expansions.
Industry analysts highlight how Hasbro’s current digital gaming strategy can be perceived as a likely bottleneck in the moving process. Whereas the publisher has been upbeat about cashing in on the Baldur’s Gate trademark, the cost of transition for such a bulky title as BG3 from one platform to another may not fit into their internal budgets. Even in the hypothetical situation of the new rumored Switch 2 featuring a much better processing capacity than its predecessor, the optimizations that would have to be performed for a title of such proportion—admittedly experiencing performance issues in its third act on existing models—would need a dedicated team and an investment size possibly dwarfing that of the game production itself.
For Nintendo fanboys, this is more of the same old grim reminder about modern licensing complexities. The original Switch saw remarkable “impossible” ports, such as The Witcher 3, but it seems that most have now washed hands of older IPs when it comes to new generations. One of the defining RPGs this decade might be absent from the next Nintendo ecosystem unless Hasbro finds a new partner to take care of the technical heavy lifting, or indeed makes a new deal with Larian’s skeleton crew. For now, the gates to Avernus remain closed for the handheld crowd.
