Austrian-led indie studio Kvltgames had completed and fully certified its Nintendo Switch port when the platform holder abruptly removed the game from the eShop. Founder Roland Moritz discusses the setback, censorship concerns, and what’s next for the studio.
Q: Can you introduce yourself and your studio for readers?
My name is Roland Moritz. I’m an Austrian game developer and the founder of Kvltgames. The studio started as a solo effort and gradually expanded into a small collective of developers from the U.S. and several European countries.
Our mission is to create games free from trend-chasing—projects that respect players’ intelligence, offer challenging gameplay, and place quality above quotas. All of us grew up in what we consider gaming’s “golden era”—the ’90s through the late 2000s—when every new title felt like a portal to imagination and developers weren’t bound by narrow creative constraints.
We released our first commercial title, The Great Rebellion, in 2024. It’s a pixel-art cyberpunk roguelike satirizing corporate authoritarianism, set in a dystopian future Europe. The game received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. Notably, it was later region-locked in Germany after authorities contacted Steam.
Following its success, several new members joined our team and we began working on multiple upcoming titles. One of those efforts was a Nintendo Switch port of The Great Rebellion. We were approved for a Nintendo developer account and pushed forward—until Nintendo unexpectedly removed the game from the eShop at the last moment.
Q: How far along were you guys in the Switch version before receiving notice from Nintendo?
We got the notice literally 2 days before scheduled launch from Nintendo of America and 1 day before launch from Nintendo of Europe.
The port itself has already been finished for well over a month and gone through Nintendo’s quite involved review process. The game has been on the eShop for 2 weeks and could be wishlisted already before that happened.
It should be noted Nintendo knew about The Great Rebellion from day 1 as we sent them a link to our Steam page in our application for a developer account and always showed our cards openly.
We sent it as a reference because the good reviews would help us get accepted so they can’t claim they didn’t know exactly what the themes of our game were from the start.
Funny enough, the game has actually been released and stayed up for a few days in the Japanese eShop and could be bought there. Some people purchased it there and do in fact now have the game on their Switch.
We hoped it would stay up at least there, but apparently our game is so much worse than everything else in their catalogue it had to be purged even in Japan.
Q: Did Nintendo provide a reason or specific policy reference?
No, the only explanation we ever got was that they believe the game “contains content that is damaging to their brand or reputation”. Despite asking back multiple times what that content exactly is, we never got anything beyond that.
This is especially strange since as mentioned, they always knew what game we made and we did even at our application that the game had political and social commentary in it but that we would adapt it to make sure it is aligned with Nintendo’s guidelines.
We knew of course that Nintendo is stricter with these things than Steam for instance, so we were willing to remove all the overt political references and jokes from the game. The general themes were of course still there,
but what remained was a “normal” cyberpunk shooter with a dystopian theme about total authoritarian control. I was actually quite proud of this version in a way, since I think it showed the game could stand on its own even without the over politics.
I honestly don’t think it has, in reality, anything to do with the game’s content and is all about who we are. We committed wrongthink and will never be forgiven for it by various activistis, so I assume somebody contacted Nintendo in the last minute and got them to fold.
I cannot prove this, but it would be plausible to assume they might have been contacted by German authorities as well.
What kind of financial or time investment had your team already made into the Switch version? How did the decision affect your studio’s plans or morale?
The investment we made was quite substantial forr us. For small indies like we are, these things can be make or break. We don’t have big investors and financial buffers so there’s little margin for error.
So we decided to prioritize the Switch port over other projectes we were working on, since it is a big deal for a small indie studio to be on the Nintendo Switch and the potential revenue could have allowed us to comfortably keep on working on our other titles.
Since we went through all the reviews and all our marketing materials etc. has been approved by Nintendo, and we even toned down the game for the Switch, we reasonably assumed that it won’t be a problem and is a worthy investment.
In total, we devoted about half a year to this. Some team members kept on working on the other titles in the meantime, but me and our other main programmer worked almost exclusively on the port.
We had to redo a lot of the game’s foundations, such as the procedural level generation, to work within the restrictions of the Switch.
We also paid for dev kits from Nintendo and had some marketing expenses, but the main damage is of course the anticipated revenue from the Switch version wich is missing now and the time we could have invested in our other games.
If we would have been rejected from the start, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal – we would have simply focused on another title we got in the works like Dverghold or Hyper Rebellion.
Now we spent all this time and are left there standing empty handed. The fact they pulled us so close to release was the worst possible scenario for us in that sense, it almost seems like it has been done to maximize damage.
Who knows, maybe someone at Nintendo of America has a personal grudge against us.
This created an emergency situation and we had to course correct instantly. It was of course very demoralizing for everyone on the team and a huge blow to us, but thankfully we have other projects we could immediately pivot to and it was
always clear we won’t just give up.
We have now decided to focus primarily on our oldschool 3D dungeon crawler “Dverghold” next and release it as Early Access Q1 2026 year to get some earnings from that as soon as possible.
Also of course our action adventure “Serene Estates: Last Guy” will launch around that time as well.
The only thing to tide us over in the meantime then are the sales of The Great Rebellion on Steam.
Q: What’s next for the game now that the Switch version has been blocked?
We might have an update with a bunch of fixes and improvements that were done as part of the Switch port and we could back port into the PC version at some point.
Also, the game is currently 70% off on Steam so now is the best time ever to get it there! Not only would it help us immensely if people buy the game there, it’s also an actually good game – The 97% positive reviews should speak for themselves.
Apart from that, we will from now on mostly focus on our next games, one of them being a sequel to The Great Rebellion: “Hyper Rebellion”, a top-down shooter with an aesthetic inspired by the isometric classic Fallout games.
Q: Next Games?
I’d especially like to mention our next game DVERGHOLD – an oldschool first-person dungeon crawler inspired by Dungeon Master and Orcs & Elves, with base building between runs similar to Darkest Dungeon. Heroic fantasy, grid-based exploration, turn-based tactical combat, oldschool hardcore dungeon crawling and an original Dungeon Synth soundtrack by renowned artist Splendorius. Early Access launches Q1 2026, and the Steam page just went live.
We’re also publishing SERENE ESTATES: LAST GUY, a Y2K-styled Frutiger Aero-themed action adventure inspired by System Shock 2 and Jak & Daxter. It already has a free demo available and can be wishlisted.
Wishlisting those games helps us a lot, because after the whole Nintendo Switch debacle the next games we’ll launch are extremely important for us.
