Has Doom Eternal for Switch been cancelled, or not?

UPDATE: Bethesda has confirmed that the physical release of Doom Eternal has been cancelled.

“While Doom Eternal is 100% on track for an imminent digital-only release on Nintendo Switch, the absence of a physical release at retail resulted in cancelled pre-orders. Affected customers will receive full refunds and should contact their preferred retailer for more information. Stay tuned for much more information coming later this month,” the publisher said in a news release.

Source – Nintendo Life

Doom Eternal is easily one of my top games that has come out this year. The action packed demon slaying simulator took everything that was great about the 2016 reboot, and turned the metal up to eleven. The game has been out for eight months now on most platforms. However the Switch version has been conspicuously absent, and fans are starting to get worried.

According to reports on social media, GameStop has been allegedly contacting pre-order customers to notify them that the game has been cancelled. Other retailers like Best Buy and Amazon have also delisted it from their respective websites.

For their part, neither id Software nor their parent company Bethesda have been particularly transparent on the status of the Switch port. Bethesda has made a somewhat vague statement on Twitter. stating that “we have not made any announcements on Doom Eternal being cancelled for Switch.” So that would seem like it then. The game isn’t cancelled. But why would a major retailer like GameStop be telling people it is? It’s left fans to run wild with speculation.

Doom 2016 was unexpectedly ported to the Switch back in 2017, with Panic Button contracted to shrink it down to Nintendo’s hybrid handheld. The results were nothing short of masterful. While it makes liberal use of dynamic resolutions and is limited to 30fps, Doom still stands as perhaps the best “impossible” port on the Switch. The game is all there, it’s smooth, and rather enjoyable to play on the go. Even if devilishly destroys battery life in handheld mode.

However, cutting 8th gen games to work on what’s equivalent to 7th gen hardware is no small feat. Some fans on social media have speculated that maybe Panic Button couldn’t pull off a miracle this time. Doom Eternal is bigger and faster paced than its predecessor, and would certainly be more difficult to adapt to mobile hardware. Others think that perhaps the game is taking the Control route, and being released as a cloud streamed version. Still more are saying that it is cancelled. And more still are saying it’s only the physical release that’s been cancelled.

Go Nintendo though claims to have inside information, from an official source close to the project, that the Switch version is 99.9% still on track. So perhaps they’re just waiting to do a GOTY version with the DLC included. All I can say is the silence from Bethesda and id Software has certainly been deafening.