Bethesda and Nintendo had to figure out how free-to-play games would work on Switch when porting Fallout Shelter

Fallout Shelter was announced for Switch during E3 2018, and it went live on the same day. As you know, the game is free-to-play. You might think it would be a simple process to put that out on Switch, but according to Bethesda's Pete Hines, there was a lot to work out. This was because the Switch hadn't seen a free-to-play game yet at the time when the port was being considered.

We talk to all of the platform folks on a regular basis. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Valve, about the games that we’re doing, what they need, what we’re trying to do. And this game [The Elder Scrolls: Legends] or any of our games are no different in that respect, which is, we talk to all of them about what our needs are, what we’re thinking, what we’re trying to do, how they work… We try to show them very early on what those games are, what they’re like, but at the end of the day those are gonna be conversations that we have with them to figure out whether or not we’re going to be able to do the things that we need on anybody’s platform. Because again, it’s not fair to bring it to just one, because there are any number of things that have come up with any number of other platform folks that we’ve said, Hey, you have to change the way that you do this, or the way that you handle this, if we’re going to be able to bring the game.

And keep in mind, we were working on Fallout Shelter for Nintendo Switch when there was no such thing as a free to play game on the Switch. So that’s a conversation that we had to have about how is this going to work? Where is this going to go? Honestly, it’s no different than that.