it’s not at all like that, and i’m not sure where you’re missing the boat.
nintendo has ownership stake in the developers of all the titles we’re talking about. it would be like if valve turned off cloud saves on left 4 dead 1. you’d come in to comment how it’s turtle rock’s fault that valve turned off a feature that was implemented by valve on a platform owned by valve for a game published and developed by valve.
in this analogy you’re also playing on the steam deck, so the hardware is also built by valve.
I can’t possibly invest 100+ hours in a Pokemon game and lose everything of the battery dies, screen breaks, console is forgotten on a bus or stolen, and so on.
it is nintendo’s choice disable cloud saves on pokémon. splatoon and animal crossing are both made by studios under nintendo’s umbrella, and nintendo already showed they can exert that pressure if they need to with animal crossing.
saying “it’s up to the devs, not nintendo” neither answers the complaint you replied to nor has any semantic relevance to the titles above. moreover, SD cards cannot be used for these titles.
Except for Pokémon games which are saved directly to the internal storage and unable to be moved unless you have the original save device (and it’s working) as well as the new device and transfer the save manually.
Splatoon is the same. Saves are locked to the system, even with NSO.
Animal crossing was the same until people raised hell about it.