With Mario Kart 8 Deluxe becoming the fastest-selling Mario Kart game of all time and with Pokkén Tournament DX coming this September, one has to wonder if Nintendo has plans to port more of the Wii U’s best games to the Switch. IGN recently posed this question to Reggie Fils-Aime, the president of Nintendo of America.
Fils-Aime states that the possibility of bringing more Wii U games to the Switch is “an active discussion” at Nintendo. He also said, however, that if more games are to be ported to the Switch, Nintendo doesn’t want them to be “pure port[s]”. Rather, they’d want the games to be “definitive version[s]” with more characters, modes, levels, etc. Both Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Pokkén Tournament DX are good examples of this. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe included new characters and brought to the game new battle modes that weren’t in the original Mario Kart 8 and Pokkén Tournament DX also has new characters that weren’t in the original while also adding 3 Vs. 3 battles and various new online battle modes. This is the kind of thing Nintendo wants to replicate if they are to make more Switch versions of Wii U games.
So what other Wii U games could potentially get Switch ports in the future? It definitely seems feasible that a port of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, which would obviously be re-titled Super Smash Bros. for Switch, could be in the works, if a new, different version of Super Smash Bros. isn’t already being worked on. This game could easily get the more-characters-and-levels treatment to justify a Switch port. Mario Party 10 was also a popular Wii U game, though it seems more likely that Nintendo would just put out Mario Party 11 rather than a Mario Party 10 Deluxe, but who knows? Splatoon was a big one, but with Splatoon 2 on its way, I don’t see a port of the original Splatoon happening any time soon. In fact, it seems like it makes more sense, in most cases, to just release sequels to Wii U games on the Switch rather than ports. But we already got Mario Kart 8 Deluxe instead of Mario Kart 9, and we’ll be getting Pokkén Tournament DX soon enough instead of Pokkén Tournament 2, so I guess only time will tell.