 Nintendo's decision to release Everybody12Switch is good news for fans of terrible rubber horse masks and bad news for people who like competent, well-made, entertaining games. At least, that's the case if an insider report from 2022 is to be believed. According to anonymous sources close to the project, playtesting for Everybody12Switch was an absolute disaster, with playtesters calling the game tedious. According to the report, no one expected Everybody12Switch to test quite as badly as it did. Different trusted employees within Nintendo were raising alarms that the game released as is would damage the company's reputation as a great software developer. Before we go any further, it's time to talk about today's sponsor, Opera GX. If your web browser feels slower than Zelda's walking speed at the start of Tears of the Kingdom, it might be time to change things up. Opera GX allows you to limit how much CPU and RAM the browser uses, so you can keep several tabs open even while gaming. 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To try it out, download it via the link in the description or scan this QR code. Doing so lets them know that we sent you. Now, what we'll be talking about? Oh yes, the new Nintendo game that everybody hates. But hang on, how can we be sure that this report was accurate? What actually happened? And why did, if the report can be trusted, playtesters hate everybody want to switch quite so much? The internet has no shortage of wannabe Nintendo insiders, eager to share rumours about games coming in the near future. For this reason, every such report should be taken with a grain of salt and scrutinised for accuracy. In this case, a June 2022 report on FanBite came from a relatively respected source, Imran Khan, a journalist who has built a strong reputation for reliable and accurate reporting of video game news. According to the report, the information presented in this article is gathered from multiple sources with knowledge of the product in question. While the sources are presented in the published story as anonymous, we have verified their connections and are posting the information they gave us with utmost faith in their accuracy. What's more, the report clearly had a degree of accurate insider knowledge. A full year before Everybody Want to Switch had even been announced, the report got its branding almost spot on. It calls the game Everybody's Want to Switch and talks about its mascot, a game show host with a horse's head. Khan clearly had some access to information about the game long before it was made public. According to Khan, making a follow-up to the Nintendo Switch launch title One to Switch was a challenge from the start. The original game is not, to be generous, the most favourably remembered of Nintendo's first-party games. At the time of its release, it was criticised for shallow gameplay that does little beyond show off all the fancy technology within the Nintendo Switch joycons. Technology that has seen little use in the years since, once it became clear that just being a portable console was enough to sell copious units without gimmicky gameplay. As a glorified tech demo for technology that has long since become ubiquitous within households worldwide, there wasn't really anywhere for the developers to go with a sequel. Yet, as one of only two first-party Nintendo Switch launch titles, One to Switch sold very well, over three million units, and this likely had an impact on the decision to make another one, whether demand was there or not. Says Khan, the title went through a few variations as the developers struggled with a core question. How exactly do you make a sequel to One to Switch? The obvious answer was simply to add more minigames, as other iterative party titles had done, but they also wanted to release a title that didn't render the first game moot and stop it from selling. The developers behind the project were Nintendo EPD Group 4, who had previously made Nintendo Labo, Ring Fit Adventure, and Game Builder Garage, as well as the original One to Switch. This team is known for experimental and often esoteric games which don't always 100% hit their mark, which, at the very least, makes them far more interesting than development teams that constantly remake the same thing. According to Khan, the team decided to base Everybody One to Switch on the online party titles offered by Jackbox Games, Fibbage, Quiplash, and the delightful Joke Boat, to name but a few. These games came to prominence during the era of social distancing, as a way for friends to spend time together online, which is, theoretically, more fun than simply having a Zoom call. Theoretically. The mileage may vary. According to Khan's report, the idea on paper was solid. Nintendo EPD Group 4 designed a host for the minigames based on international appeal, a bipedal horse that looked like a man wearing a rubber horse mask. The game's text simply referred to him as horse, because it sounded enough like the English word host that it would come across in different languages. Minigames would ask players to physically move around the environment for things like musical chairs, or use their phone to play bingo. There was even a game that resembled a virtual version of Spin the Bottle that involved saying something nice about another person. It tested horribly. According to Khan, playtesters, largely families with children, found much of the game's content incredibly dull. Khan specifically mentions the bingo minigame as being described as tedious, and says that horse was less than popular. Apparently, the main 2v2 mode that featured horse most prominently was so unpopular that, during the localization process, it earned a nickname we can't repeat, because it was very rude, and this is a family channel. If Khan's report can be taken at face value, and it absolutely should not be taken at face value, then a year ago, Everybody Want to Switch was a game that nobody necessarily wanted, nobody knew how to make, and nobody enjoyed playing. So why is Nintendo releasing it anyway? Well, it's important to note that a lot can change in a year. Khan specifically points out that it's not uncommon for games to be changed dramatically following playtesting, and that negative feedback during development is by no means a reflection of the finished product. From the sounds of it, though, Nintendo wasn't expecting feedback to be quite this dire, which may explain why, according to Khan, the company had already started manufacturing materials for the game before the severity of the problem was revealed. According to Khan, presuming that extra development would not be a problem, Nintendo went ahead with other publisher duties on the game, like printing out the cover art and placing it in the requisite cases for a retail release. Per sources, there's still a large number of empty game boxes for the title, just sitting and waiting for a game with no current release date. Now, a year has passed. Everybody Want to Switch has no doubt undergone further development and playtesting. At the time of making this video, the title has not been released, so it's unclear how much this earlier report reflects the finished game. Nintendo has enough confidence in the title to actually release it, which may be a good sign. That said, the game is retailing for 24.99, significantly lower than the original Want to Switch at launch and even today. Apparently, Nintendo's confidence only reaches so far this time around. The moral of the story? You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it any less creepy.