BODY: A co-op party game with more than eight million copies sold now comes with an unusual message from its creator: please don't buy it right now.
On October 13, Japanese indie studio TECOPARK posted from the official PICO PARK account (@picoparkgame) on X asking Nintendo Switch 2 owners to refrain from purchasing the original PICO PARK โ recently rebranded PICO PARK 1 โ for the time being. According to the post, numerous players have reported that when they start an online session on Switch 2, the screen goes completely white at WORLD 1-2 and the game simply cannot continue.
The fault appears to be exclusive to Switch 2. No equivalent reports have surfaced from the original Switch hardware or the PC version, and the studio says the cause remains unclear, with a recent Switch 2 system update among the suspects. There is no timeline for a fix. The 2024 sequel PICO PARK 2 is reportedly unaffected.
More striking is what TECOPARK did next: it asked Nintendo to temporarily pull the game from the eShop entirely. As of reporting, the listing was still live and purchasable โ meaning Switch 2 owners could still buy a game whose own developer is publicly advising against it. For a title built around eight-player chaos, WORLD 1-2 is early enough that a new buyer would hit the wall within minutes.
PICO PARK debuted on Steam in 2016, arrived on Switch in June 2019, and became a global streaming staple during the 2021 co-op boom. It is the work of one person, the designer-programmer-artist known simply as Teco.
The insider take
This is what the Switch 2 backward-compatibility story looks like from the trenches of Japan's indie scene. A one-person studio has no QA lab, no spare dev kits, and no account manager to ring when new silicon breaks a six-year-old build โ so the tools available are a transparent post on X and a polite request to the platform holder. That bluntness is very characteristic of Japanese indie devs, who tend to communicate directly with players rather than through PR, and Japanese replies were overwhelmingly supportive rather than angry. The uncomfortable part is the storefront: a developer can warn the public in an afternoon, but delisting moves on Nintendo's clock, not Teco's.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).