You may have noticed that a lot of Fighting games are coming to the Switch. The Neo Geo Arcade Archives, as well as the Street Fighter collection from Capcom, SNK has a few like SNK Heroines and Samurai Showdown, Indie titles like Pocket Rumble and Fantasy Strike. Mortal Kombat 11, Arc System Works with BlazBlue and Classic Guilty Gear plus DBFZ and Kill La Kill IF, To even Nintendo's own ARMS and Super Smash Bros. The only games its missing are Tekken 7, Soul Calibur VI, and DoA6. This is the most a Nintendo console has gotten from the genre since at least the Game Boy Advance. But I feel the biggest reason for the surge of Switch fighters has to do with the console's hardware, specifically, the Joy-Con. Yeah, they may not look like, or be the best fighting game controllers. But their shareable nature, limited travel distance of the sticks, and the mobile nature of the Switch itself lends well to the genre's arcade roots since it's like taking an actual arcade cabinet anywhere you go.
Of course, Fighting game pros will always want to opt for a Fight Stick or at least a D-Pad controller since those will always be the best options for actual competition. But for some less serious competition or quick fun with friends, they're perfectly fine. I actually think the Switch is the first console that can give the genre more popularity since as I mentioned earlier, it's the modern equivalent of an arcade cabinet due to the system's portability and versatility of the Joy-Con, allowing the experience to be more social and active, just like the arcades. It also helps that FIghting Games are one of the easiest genres to run on low end hardware due to their simple nature and generally lower graphics fidelity compared to other games, so most of them can be ported to Switch with only a couple sacrifices while still preserving frame-rate.
Of course, Fighting game pros will always want to opt for a Fight Stick or at least a D-Pad controller since those will always be the best options for actual competition. But for some less serious competition or quick fun with friends, they're perfectly fine. I actually think the Switch is the first console that can give the genre more popularity since as I mentioned earlier, it's the modern equivalent of an arcade cabinet due to the system's portability and versatility of the Joy-Con, allowing the experience to be more social and active, just like the arcades. It also helps that FIghting Games are one of the easiest genres to run on low end hardware due to their simple nature and generally lower graphics fidelity compared to other games, so most of them can be ported to Switch with only a couple sacrifices while still preserving frame-rate.
