The Alan Wake Remake Is Heading To A Surprising Console
The Alan Wake Remaster release still has some nuts and bolts to work out, but they have announced a surprising console change.
This article is more than 2 years old
In an announcement video that was admittedly expected ages ago, Remedy Entertainment announces the Alan Wake Remaster, a remastered version of 2010’s action-adventure Alan Wake, is coming to a surprising console. The remastered version of the game was previously released in late 2021 for Sony’s gaming consoles and Xbox Game Pass supported hardware. However, as per the newest announcement, the remaster is now coming to Nintendo Switch.
Porting a game from one console to another isn’t all that surprising, and gaming manufacturers have done it since the dawn of multi-platform releases. However, what’s truly surprising with the Switch version of Alan Wake Remastered is the fact that the game isn’t a port. As per a report published by Nintendo Life, the upcoming game is specifically developed to natively run on the Switch hardware — which recently had a price drop — and will launch as a digital Switch release only.
A specific release date for the game wasn’t mentioned Among a whole avalanche of information Remedy Entertainment has dropped, but the company promised to reveal the release date in the coming months, closer to the game’s launch. This could indicate that we might get a Switch version of Alan Wake Remastered by the year’s end, though judging by the ongoing trends in the gaming industry, fans should add another 6-12 months to our assumption. It would seem that the gaming industry has decided to be fashionably late — way too fashionably if you ask us.
As per our previous report, the original Alan Wake game was released in 2010 for the iconic Xbox 360 and came to PC via Steam two years later. The Xbox release was a massive commercial and critical success on its own, and it paved the way for the fantastic financial performance of the subsequent PC release — the revenue from sales of the PC version of the game has surpassed the game’s development and marketing costs within 48 hours of its release. Pretty impressive.
However, the original game was entirely exclusive to Microsoft’s platforms and wholly excluded PlayStation console owners — something Remedy Entertainment sought to correct when they acquired the rights from Microsoft and released the Alan Wake Remastered on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC. Unfortunately, the game of this magnitude never received a sequel due to licensing rights issues and a lack of publishing approval from Microsoft Studios.
But that’s old news; besides announcing the release of Alan Wake Remastered for Nintendo Switch, Remedy Entertainment revealed that the development of Alan Wake 2 (not an official name) is going well and that the game should be ready for a 2023 launch, despite the lack of gameplay footage or a playable demo. Some could take this as a bad omen and prepare for another crushing delay. However, creating a gameplay trailer or a playable demo takes months of work, which could take away from development.
We’re not saying that a delay of Alan Wake Remaster isn’t a possibility; we’re saying that some of us still remember a time in which we only had a single reveal trailer in 240p or 360p resolution ahead of the game’s release. Perhaps some rumors from gaming magazines, which were still printed on actual paper back then, but that was it. A lack of a playable demo or a gameplay trailer wasn’t indicative of a troubling development — which unfortunately can’t be said for the modern gaming industry. Oh, and the games were generally better, too.
