I imagine it would be a better tablet, hopefully it would also have complete backward compatibility.
Edit: I see there are a lot of replies already on my comment but I need to add more thoughts to it, I have the feeling that if Nintendo is going to release a better tablet with complete backward compatibility with the Switch, most developers will continue to develop for the original console instead of developing games for the new hardware as the Switch has sold >120mln of consoles, this is good for the consumer but it's probably not what Nintendo would want if their new generation console is seen as a "New 3ds" (there are only a dozen of games that run exclusively on this console, all the others run on the original hardware).
I feel like they pretty much have to make it backwards compatible. They just released a new Zelda game which is like a once-every-7-years event and there's no way they're gonna make people re-buy the game a year after launch on the new console, especially when they already made it the most expensive single price for a Switch game. Plus they have a fairly big Mario release coming up next month (Super Mario Bros Wonder), which again, they're not gonna make people re-buy within a year of release.
It doesn't make sense to be launching these big titles a year before the new console if you only have a year to buy/play them before they sell you a new console that can't play it. Nintendo historically hasn't worked like that.
My guess is it'll be backwards compatible like the jump from DS to 3DS, where the cartridge slot fits the last gen system's games and has the same contacts, but the new gen cartridges are shaped with some extra protrusion of plastic that stops you from shoving them into the last gen system.
They make weird decisions but not when it comes to something like this. They're not gonna not have their new Zelda game on their new console, and they've never done a rerelease for a new system so quickly after a launch where there was only one platform to buy the game on at launch.
People point to Breath of the Wild, but that launched same day on Wii U and Switch. They weren't reselling you the game unless you chose the buy the Wii U version and then later wanted it on Switch.
Meh, they aren’t that weird considering their audience is children, and the majority of parents can’t set up parental controls to save their lives.
Plus, our news media is totally going to report a single pedophile incident with Nintendo Switch Online to high heaven regardless of whether parental controls would have prevented it.
There's nothing preventing them from serving recompiled versions from the store though, right? As long as the behaviour is the same, they could have two different versions behind the scenes for the first party games (Mario, Zelda).
Indeed. Hopefully Nintendo releases more games from it on the Switch, but the rumor mill and message from Dolphin is that GameCube games are often harder to emulate on the Switch than Wii games. Data miners also reported that Super Mario Sunshine had the most tech work done to get it running compared to 64 or Galaxy.
But if you are Nintendo, the Wii and the Switch are about equally successful phenomenons. That didn’t save them from the Wii U; and the success of the Switch certainly won’t save them from a Switch 2 implosion. Even if the games are good (like the Wii U launching with Mario Kart 8, now the bestselling Switch title.)
It wasn't a launch title, it came like a year and a half after the Wii U's launch. And even though it was pretty good, it was an exception. The Wii U really didn't have much in terms of killer apps. Nintendo was releasing some very bland stuff in the early-to-mid 2010s.
Plus they botched the marketing horribly between the name "Wii U" and never showing the console itself, only the gamepad, making many consumers believe it was just a Wii accessory they didn't want.
They were released simultaneously, Breath of the Wild was a Switch launch title. Same with Twilight Princess (actually I think the Wii version might have launched a few weeks before the Gamecube, I assume that was more to incentivize people to buy a Wii. Not the potential issue here regardless)
Tears of the Kingdom already had its launch and sold a TON of copies. If the new console isn't backwards compatible, they either are going to have to resell it to you which is a big ask, or just not have a new Zelda game available to play on their new system for another 6-7 years, which is not likely.
True, but those came out at the same time, so most people were only buying one of them. Whereas Nintendo just sold 18 million copies of Tears of the Kingdom, so a lot of the expected buyers of a Switch 2 version would probably already have it.
If 99.9% compatibility is good enough they could probably switch vendors if they reimplemented NVN on a different SOC, assuming that Nintendo was smart enough to retain the rights to reimplement NVN.
Reimplementing NVN is a big lift so NVidia certainly has the inside track but it's probably enough of a threat that Nintendo has some negotiating power.
> With today's Nvidia I am just worried Nintendo isn't getting any decent deals.
The current-gen Switch is kinda crazy underpowered. There's plenty of room for Nvidia to improve on the 20/16nm TSMC process used in the original, as well as adding better acceleration for modern features like DLSS, ML and ray tracing. It would still be an enormous performance leap even if they both phone it in and fab the console on cheap-as-chips TSMC 7nm.
> better acceleration for modern features like DLSS, ML and ray tracing
I hope none of this makes it into the next Switch. It's already enough that these things are completely ruining PC game performance, I don't want to buy a console in 2023 that can only play games at 480p upscaled.
To each their own. In fairness to the current Switch, frame upscaling via FSR already exists in everything from DOOM to Tears of the Kingdom. You may already be playing upscaled 480p games.
The point of naming those technologies was mostly just to spitball different things Nintendo and Nvidia might be interested in. It's hard to say what they focus on for the next generation.
> frame upscaling via FSR already exists in everything from DOOM to Tears of the Kingdom. You may already be playing upscaled 480p games.
I know, and those games look awful unless you're playing them on a tiny screen or sitting far away from it. 1080p screens were standard 10+ years ago, and rendering games natively at that resolution and 60fps was easily done on any decent PC of the time, even if sometimes you sometimes had to turn down the quality settings a bit.
An entire decade later, I think it's unacceptable to release games that cannot be played at native 1080p 60fps on current gen hardware. DLSS & co. are simply being used as excuses by developers to not properly optimize their games (in some cases, releasing games that struggle to run on the best available hardware, see Starfield), and they will never look as good as native resolution.
Worried is a weird word when we are talking about Nintendo.
Nintendo is scummy AF advertising/marketing to children and their constant abuse of fans for playing recreationally with IP.
Nintendo is probably a negative externality given their marketing to children. To this day, I still have a mental illness of obsession to their games, and I hate playing them.
And I fondly remember playing Nintendo games as a kid and still do to this day some 25 years later with recent titles. Could the 120 hours-and-counting in TOTK have been spent more productively? Sure, but it's nothing compared to the time people spend watching TV series. Was every moment spent farming stuff for upgrades super fun? Not really, but I was not held captive and nothing in life is uninterrupted enjoyment.
Any addiction is bad, but unless the "item" is pushed in malice (like, say, tobacco), I would not consider that to be the fault of the creator. Unlike others, they are not actively (or at least only minimally) pushing gambling, gacha games, loot-boxes, "season-passes" and other abusive psychological tricks as their core strategy (the concept of a game is in itself not malicious or bad). So in that sense, I consider them a positive and rather responsible game company.
The only really negative comment I have for Nintendo (other than just generally wanting better stuff), is that their use of DMCA and other IP protection is completely absurd.
Blame and opinions aside, I hope you find a way through your illness.
>Could the 120 hours-and-counting in TOTK have been spent more productively?
Its not a productivity thing, it's a manipulation thing. Zelda games have been getting worse since Wind Waker, yet we continue to play them. They arent fun, we are just under the control of Nintendo.
Chatgpt said we do this because of FOMO and Nostalgia.
"Manipulation". Is writing jokes designed to make you laugh manipulation? Making games designed for me to enjoy - including if this involves the pleasant sensation of nostalgia - is not something I see reason to complain about.
Sure, wind waker is a good game, but I had much more fun playing BotW on master mode. I have yet to finish TotK, so we'll have that one ends up comparing.
So say what you want, it won't change that I'm having voluntary fun playing these games over here.
I'll take whatever Nintendo is doing over gambling and fomo-baited cash shops in games any day. Though Nintendo's popular mobile games are as bad as any mobile gacha "experience".
Funny enough, they somehow managed to make Splatoon 3 feel more like a FOMO-infested skinner box than most modern live service games I've tried, despite it having no microtransactions.
> Nintendo is scummy AF advertising/marketing to children and their constant abuse of fans for playing recreationally with IP.
This is really not my experience. To my eye they don't seem to be engaged in the majority of the awful practices around marketing that are pervasive in tech today.
As for the "constant abuse of fans" thing - is Nintendo really that different from any other company who has to protect their IP in this arena? There have definitely been frustrating situations around fan games and the like, but the argument I've always seen (which makes sense) is that they pretty much have to enforce copyright zealously to prevent loss of control of their brands.
Also, this is Nintendo. Like it or not, and whether they like it or not, child friendly is their brand.
Who’s to say, that if you allow one fan game, some pedophile won’t make their own fan game? And kids won’t start sending messages about how they appreciate his game?
I have kids, who have Nintendo consoles, and who like Nintendo's games, and I pay pretty close attention to their net usage and what they see on their consoles.
It might well be the case that I'm enough a firewall that their sinister marketing isn't making it into my home, but I haven't personally seen it. I'd be interested to hear more specific examples of what you mean.
I'm not claiming they're not doing anything wrong, just that it's not consistent with my own experience of Nintendo. Their console seems to be more respectful of my kids than most other platforms (although the fact that there's not a good way to block the Youtube app is a glaring omission - you can password protect the eShop and prevent it from making it onto their device in the first place, but there should really be a way to block a specific application, and nothing I've tried in their parental controls has worked).
Where's the marketing in what I've said? They make good games. Their console isn't full of ads or micro transactions or other bullshit. They made good games when I was a kid and they still do now. The console is more family friendly than the other two big ones.
Do they market to kids? Of course. They make big budget kids movies. They sell t shirts and posters and toys. But I'm just not seeing what's so sinister here.
Part of that is that the entire OS, including the Store, runs on one CPU core. Makes sense - that’s how you open the store quickly to think, “should I buy this DLC?” and then change your mind. This is also why the background music for some games plays while you are browsing the Store. Games run on the remaining three CPU cores at all times.
A more technical reason for this was that this prevented the need to implement preemptive multitasking in the microkernel OS, which would have been very slow by comparison. (Yes, the Switch OS uses cooperative multitasking for itself, but with sandboxing for unruly games.)
Of course, running anything web-related on one ARM CPU core from 2015 is going to suck, regardless of the technical rationale.
Whilst those are all entirely valid technical reasons, I as a customer do not care at all and it is a bad experience. Not bad enough that it affects them financially, but just something that stands out on an otherwise incredibly polished product.
> One Switch 2 demo is a souped up version of Switch launch title Zelda: Breath of the Wild, designed to hit the Switch 2's beefier target specs. (To be clear, though - this is just a tech demo. There's no suggestion the game will be re-released.)
That would not be very Nintendo to just deliver a powered-up version of their console, after already delivering an improved OLED model. The last incremental iteration would have been the GameBoy advance, but even then, the form factor changed a lot.
Nintendo is like simulated annealing with high temperature—they'll drop successful designs in favor of something new, to prevent getting stuck at a local maximum. The Gameboy Advance SP was a fantastic design, and then dropped it in favor of the Nintendo DS. That was a good change.
Newly increased competition with the Steam Deck and others, and more than one iteration of the Switch already. Maybe a novelty factor to draw in consumers.
The Wii U bombed, a console that played it safe, and the story we're told is it was because the name confused consumers / was improperly marketed. I'm not sure that's the whole picture, but this is a risk yet again with the release of the OLED and Switch lite not that long ago.
They still have the "Nintendo advantage" of their products being unique and family-oriented on the market, but that's not always enough. At any rate the timing seems to be right (notwithstanding supply issues), it's roughly a decade since the Switch was originally released. Sony and MSFT already made the jump.
Another consideration: I'm not sure what the innovation/novelty options are at this point. Maybe they don't have much of a choice but to capitalize on a rock-solid 1st party line-up. Right now I think Nintendo does couch co-op better than anyone else, so they could drive that even further.
I'm curious: how senior you have to be at a company to attend a demo like this? Probably it was shown for the AAA industry right, like EA, Ubisoft, Epic etc.? Do they invite competitors as well? Microsoft has games on the Switch. So obviously there is an NDA but is it the C-suite or the senior engineers who can have a look?
In the past, the audience is game studio heads and their producers to get the ideas flowing on what the novel capabilities of the new system are and how they can design games for it. Maybe some top engineering folks. Also for nintendo to get feedback from studios - "ah, yes, we've been thinking of doing augmented reality and it would be really cool if the camera had X feature so we can do Y in our game". AAA for sure, likely most indie shops. In the past direct competitors would not be invited.
There really isn't any information about the console in this article, just that it was demoed. Which is to be expected if they're releasing next year. And if they're not releasing next year, I'm not sure what they expect to sell.
> Developer presentations for Switch 2 took place behind closed doors, Eurogamer understands, with partners shown tech demos of how well the system is designed to run.
> One Switch 2 demo is a souped up version of Switch launch title Zelda: Breath of the Wild, designed to hit the Switch 2's beefier target specs. (To be clear, though - this is just a tech demo. There's no suggestion the game will be re-released.)
Interesting that it's just the graphics being shown off. Its not clear if it's a "switch 2" or if it'll have other strange hardware/form factor quirks, all we have so far is "the graphics hardware will be better".
Actually, just straight-up re-releasing remasters of the games might be a way to make backward compatibility work as a business model. I'm really cynical that, while the consumers in threads like this widely consider the backward compatibility to be an obvious choice, it just doesn't make business sense in a world where certain companies in particular make such a killing by perpetually re-selling the same games back to the same people over and over again. It's too lucrative and too effective. But if you can make the system backward compatible and still sell them those games a second time anyway, it's a win/win.
You can see them doing this with the WiiU lineup, which it turns out in hindsight had a lot of good games for it. But this works for them precisely because "nobody" bought those games, and there was still a good amount of time between rereleases.
I don't think Nintendo is dim enough to release a Switch 2 next year and try to re-release Breath of the Wild for it.
In fact I'll go out on a limb and suggest that based on previous console lifecycles, and the way the 1st party support tends to trail off towards the end of the cycle so they can dev on the new console so it can have a release line up, and the way that (current) Switch releases are powering through like there isn't a new console coming out in a year, that we're looking at a very high probability of a 100% backwards compatible console here. Otherwise I think they'd be holding more of this stuff back for the next release.
With the way consoles work nowadays it'd be pretty easy for them to release a new engine for BotW/TotK for a Switch 2 that just comes down as a patch like any other when you plug the cartridge in. And you hardly even need a new engine just to push out a higher res display, as emulators prove.
I have to imagine the Steam Deck playing in the same price bracket (the refurb base model was going for $320), Nintendo _may_ feel the pressure to support backwards compatibility. Why buy a new device and Breath of the Wild over again when you could just get a Deck and play a large % of ever PC game to have ever existed?
Nintendo is also in a different position this time around, as the WiiU, DS, 3DS, etc had such different hardware that remaking a game for the Switch was essentially a necessity, whereas I expect the Switch 2 to be a Switch with faster hardware.
Day 1 Switch owner and very early Deck owner. I don’t play with the deck enough because a lot of stuff is fiddly once you get away from the Steam store. I’ve seen lots of talk about emulators and things but it’s not terribly easy to set up.
Many of the new ps4 titles have "free upgrade" to the ps5 version on offer, for instance Armored Core 6. However, the largest difference between versions seems to be frame rate and resolution. I wonder if Nintendo would consider that for actual graphical upgrades.
Zelda: BOTW and TOTK are both ridiculous achievements on the Switch hardware. 30fps and usually no framedrops even with the huge field of view, physics engine, volumetric clouds, wind and rain modelling and so on. While obviously a higher framerate or better LoD would be nice, they've made the game playable enough on Switch 1 that I'm not that bothered, and that's an amazing achievement.
I predict they'll play it safe; same form factor (but iterated on, like the oled model), backwards compatible, just faster and/or better battery life. There's few things they NEED to improve on the device.
I hope it'll be like the PS4 Pro though (or cross-generation PS/xbox games), where developers are not allowed to make their game "switch 2 only". It didn't work at all for their "New Nintendo 2/3DS" line, only a small handful of games ended up being made or optimized for the improved hardware (https://www.reddit.com/r/3DS/wiki/exclusives/)
I think the last couple of Switch hardware versions filled that niche. This is meant to be a brand new console. It's interesting that they're keeping the Switch name, considering how that panned out with the Wii U.
I know console people won't like this but I wish the went back to two consoles, I hate how big the switch is, all my life I bought nintendo portables only cause they were small and I could bring in my pocket...
I think that in this day and age that niche is pretty much filled by smartphones, though. Not perfectly, but enough that it's hard to compete.
The Switch does well because it's a bunch of things that your smartphone isn't -- bigger screen, better controls, and also a home console that connects to your TV -- while still being small enough that it's easy to slip into a bag you might be carrying.
If you want something pocketable, look into what Anbernic and Retroid are doing.
They have, for example, OG Gameboy sized consoles with enough power to emulate everyting up to about PS1/Gamecube: https://anbernic.com/products/rg35xx
I think it's more that there's mo market left for that.
Emulation is a thing now, and small third party hardware makers are filling the niche. And at the other end phones have more power than even the Switch has. That's why the SteamDeck or ROG Ally are on the bigger side. Betting against the smartphone is a losing bet.
Honest question from a videogame noob who considers buying a console for someone as a Christmas gift: does that mean that there is a chance of getting a Switch 1 (new, not used) cheaper soon?
For one, all of the rumors point to the next console being aimed for 2024, so it won't be there in time for Christmas.
For another, Nintendo rarely discounts their main consoles just because a successor comes out. The "Nintendo 2DS" system went to its lowest price of $100 MSRP in 2015[0], one year before the Switch was even announced, and included a free game. But when the Switch came out, neither the 3DS/2DS systems, nor the home console Wii U, saw a price drop in response.
Other consoles, like their Wii, Gamecube, and DS, saw price drops near the end of the lifespan, but not in response to the new console coming out. And the Switch has kept its same MSRP this entire time, not counting the Switch Lite coming out at a cheaper price tag.
Not to say that'll never happen, but historically, the price cut would've happened by now...
What's wrong with used? Craigslist is best as you can ostensibly ask seller to demo it for you briefly before you buy and it usually comes with their game catalog as well.
Nothing, but I'd prefer to buy a new one as a gift. Also, the second-hand market is probably way smaller here in Poland, and shipping from the US is pretty expensive.
Doubtful, unless the Switch 1 line is discontinued. There are Lite ($199) and OLED ($349) models now, if you're looking for something other than the standard ($299).
I sold my old 2080 at the right time and made $100 but I was out a graphics card for over a year. Sold my steam deck as well and only lost about $75. Due to kids I didnt have time to play it along with the switch and some desktop PC games.
Check eBay prices and local Craigslist/FB market place.
It’s impossible for me to game on 3 consoles due to time constraints. Juggling 2/3 (switch/deck) and switching 2/3 (switch/PC) a year later is not a big deal.
I had an intel CPU with an integrated GPU at the time and a laptop and servers at home.
Edit: I see there are a lot of replies already on my comment but I need to add more thoughts to it, I have the feeling that if Nintendo is going to release a better tablet with complete backward compatibility with the Switch, most developers will continue to develop for the original console instead of developing games for the new hardware as the Switch has sold >120mln of consoles, this is good for the consumer but it's probably not what Nintendo would want if their new generation console is seen as a "New 3ds" (there are only a dozen of games that run exclusively on this console, all the others run on the original hardware).