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Switch indie games get the spotlight during the Nindies Showcase on March 20

Steven Petite
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Nindies Showcase Spring 2018

Even though we are fresh off of a Nintendo Direct filled with exciting reveals like Super Smash Bros., Nintendo isn’t done for the month of March. On Tuesday, March 20, Nintendo will air a Nindies Showcase — a stream dedicated to indie games in the pipeline for Nintendo Switch.

The Nindies Showcase starts at 12 p.m. ET and can be streamed directly from Nintendo and on YouTube. We’ve put the stream in this post, so you can bookmark this page and come back to watch it with us.

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Interestingly, the showcase coincides with a Nintendo event at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference. While the events could be completely separate from one another, we wouldn’t be surprised if some of the games shown during the showcase are playable at GDC.

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This will be the third Nindies Showcase and the first of 2018. The most recent showcase aired last August and showed off 20 of the most promising indie titles for Switch including SteamWorld Dig 2, Shovel Knight: King of Cards, No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Again, and Super Meat Boy Forever.

We expect the upcoming Nindies Showcase to feature a similarly robust lineup. Perhaps we will finally learn a release date for the highly anticipated Switch port of Hollow Knight, or maybe we will learn when Yacht Club Games’ final Shovel Knight expansion, the aforementioned King of Cards, is due to arrive.

The Switch has quickly become a marvelous platform for indie games. Its hybrid design lends itself well to smaller titles that feel more at home on a handheld. But no one could have predicted just how well some indie games perform on Switch.

When Enter the Gungeon came to Switch in December, the roguelike sold 75,000 copies in just two weeks, surpassing developer Dodge Roll’s expectations. And in early January, Super Meat Boy nearly made more money on Day One than it did on Xbox 360 — an astounding stat since it was a port of a seven-year-old game. Shovel Knight performed better at launch than it had on any other platform, and SteamWorld Dig 2 moved 10 times more copies than it did during its launch on  Steam in 2017.

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be Nintendo's first Switch game to be priced at $70. News that Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed titles on the system, will have an increased price compared to its predecessor came as a surprise over three-and-a-half years after its announcement. It also raised questions about what the future of pricing for Nintendo games will be, especially as Sony, Microsoft, and third-party publishers all upped the cost of their new games in recent years. 
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Jijiashvili provided us with a graphic created by Omdia that "shows what the typical price points for each generation would look like if you adjusted for inflation." As you can see, the inflation-adjusted prices are only exponentially growing, and the big game pricing shifts the graph highlights were all technically not even enough to keep up with inflation when they happened. 

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