Even with that though, home-brew games are almost nonexistent on the Switch, or extremely minimal. Having the ability to launch a game with a modded Switch, doesn't mean you have access to the SDK, or the documentation. Without those things, you really can't write any useful programs. It's like gaining access to the cockpit of a plane, and having no manual or labels on what all the buttons do.
If you truly want to develop a Switch game, you need the SDK, and dev hardware is basically necessary as well. That's only coming from a deal with Nintendo.
> Having the ability to launch a game with a modded Switch, doesn't mean you have access to the SDK, or the documentation.
The very same websites and forums and Discord servers where the people who come up with jailbreaks for the Switch hang out, can also point you to leaked copies of SDKs, and ways to use these with a jailbroken switch and/or an emulator like Yuzu. (After all, while most published console homebrew — including jailbreaks — use ground-up rewrites of support libraries, it's a lot easier to tinker on Proof-of-Concepts for exploit chains using the official SDK.)
> and dev hardware is basically necessary as well. That's only coming from a deal with Nintendo.
Funny enough, you can find all sorts of dev hardware for old consoles on eBay... and yes, that's despite all such kits being closed-lifecycle systems that are supposed to be returned to the OEM when no longer used. (I think the main way these make it out into the market, is through the company that owns them going bankrupt and getting its assets liquidated.)
Modern console devkits don't boot unless they have an Internet connection through the manufacturer's VPN, so buying devkits on eBay is useless now. They started doing this with the Xbox One.
The reason why they did this is because of leakers. The Xbox 360's devkits connected to a separate Xbox Live network called PartnerNet, and anyone who wanted to test Xbox Live functionality - e.g. buying games or DLC - needed to actually upload their game to PartnerNet. This meant that everyone with a devkit got full access to a lot of prerelease games.
There were rings of people with devkits leaking games for gamer clout. The way they got access to the hardware was interesting. Microsoft actually didn't let liquidators touch the consoles[0], but they still needed to dispose of them. The electronics recyclers Microsoft hired didn't do a good job of this, so there was a cottage industry of people taking debug fused CPUs off destroyed motherboards and swapping them onto retail boards. This would give you something identical to a low-spec devkit that lets you run unsigned code and connect to PartnerNet, but doesn't have any of the crazier debug capabilities useful for development.
[0] Notably, the state of Rhode Island tried liquidating the devkits of the Kingdoms of Amalur developers and got stopped by Microsoft
That being said, most retail jailbreaks also let you jailbreak development consoles anyway. Development and retail hardware is very close to one another, they differ purely in what debug interfaces are available and what DRM gets enforced.
devkitPro (libnx) has a complete OpenGL implementation with solid SDL2 port. I have ported my game engine to it with ease. There are even homebrew Godot ports for Switch that have been going on for years now. There's absolutely no trouble with writing proper homebrew for the Switch, no deals with Nintendo necessary.
> Even with that though, home-brew games are almost nonexistent on the Switch, or extremely minimal.
One major reason for that is that Nintendo aggressively permabans Switch devices that appear to be modded, preventing them from ever being used online.
If you truly want to develop a Switch game, you need the SDK, and dev hardware is basically necessary as well. That's only coming from a deal with Nintendo.