The Nintendo Switch 2: Pulitzer-Winning Analysis

Nintendo recently pulled back the curtains on the Switch 2 console, the successor to the 2017 Nintendo Switch that’s been single-handedly sustaining the company’s video game business (by which I mean single-handedly sustaining the company itself—they’ve branched out into partnerships for movies and theme parks, and they have their apps and merch as a side hustle, but they’re not like Sony or Microsoft where they could survive the loss of their gaming division). I know some of my loyal readers aren’t part of the Gamer Nation, so let me briefly put in context why this was a big deal.

Compared to its competitors (Sony, Microsoft, Sega back when Sega was making consoles), Nintendo has always been a bit eccentric. Where other console manufacturers make something successful and then iterate on it with more powerful “sequels” (Sony literally numbers its Playstation consoles like movie sequels), Nintendo frequently goes back to the drawing board with its new hardware, forgoing raw increases in computational power for innovative gameplay methods. This has been a double-edged sword.

On one hand it gave Nintendo the Wii and the DS, two of the best-selling video game consoles of all time. On the other hand it gave Nintendo the Wii U and the 3DS, both of which underperformed compared to their predecessors, the former so badly that it brought the company into arguably the most precarious position it’s ever been in. And even when this strategy succeeds, it’s sometimes a pyrrhic victory: the Wii sold extremely well, but it burned Nintendo’s core demographic by focusing on casual, simplistic games, and it pissed off everyone who owned one with long game droughts and a library that became increasingly dominated by cheap shovelware.

The Switch saved Nintendo after the Wii U’s failure. More than that, it restored them to a position of security they hadn’t had in years; the Switch is currently on track to become the best-selling home console in the company’s long history. It’s not appropriate to describe Nintendo as “beating” Sony and Microsoft since the “console war” doesn’t really exist anymore—all three of the hardware makers are doing their own thing these days instead of directly competing with each other—but if you were to look at it that way, they’d be comfortably ahead of Sony and running laps around Microsoft.

So naturally, that raises the question: what do they do next? Take the safe option and make a straightforward Switch sequel, or toss it out and try something new?

Smartly, they went for the former option. Now that all of the details have been revealed, let’s look at them: the console itself, the games, and the Weird Nintendo Bullshit, because with Nintendo there’s always Weird Bullshit even when they’re taking the safe route.

The Hardware

The Switch 2 is a lot like the Switch 1. Same detachable controllers, same hybrid handheld/docked console format, same button layout. I always liked the jaunty neon blue and red colour scheme of the original console, but it did undeniably make it look very toy-like, which is something that Nintendo have alternatingly embraced and struggled against over the years. It seems like this time they’re trying to distance themselves from it with a more muted grey colour scheme, but I like that the controllers still have that little pop of blue and red on the analog sticks and internal rails.

Speaking of which, the Joy-Cons attach magnetically to the console this time. They emphasised during the video presentation that the magnets are very strong, and that better be true; I don’t want these things wobbling or moving at all when I’m playing. The entire form factor of the console is notably bigger and chunkier, which I’m very pleased with as a possessor of large hands. I actually had to get bigger third-party controllers for the original Switch because the dinky little official Joy-Cons were physically uncomfortable for me to use, so I’m hoping that’s not an issue this time.

Both Joy-Cons have a laser sensor on the side, which lets you use them like mice. This is the sort of thing Nintendo likes doing—even after they returned to a “normal” controller layout as the default following the Wii, they still can’t help but put little gimmicks in their consoles. My problem with this is that they have a bad habit of adding these features to their consoles, putting out a few games that use them heavily, and then completely abandoning them. This then disincentivises other developers from using them as well, so the feature is simply forgotten about. For example, the original Switch has an IR sensor at the bottom of the right Joy-Con, which I have never used a single time despite buying the console on launch day in 2017.

Mouse functionality seems like it might have more use cases, since in theory you don’t need to engineer games from the ground up to use it—you can just port something that already has mouse controls to the Switch 2, and there’s a lot of games that have mouse controls. The Switch 1 did very well with ports of PC indie games—multiple developers have stated that their games sold better on the Switch eshop than on any other platform—so I wonder if getting formally PC-only games onto the Switch 2 might have been the thinking behind this. If so, it’s a sound decision.

On the other hand, that will heavily depend on how comfortable the Joy-Cons are to actually use this way. For my money, I don’t think they look particularly comfortable, and I can’t see myself playing a strategy game or an adventure game using these narrow little controllers when I could just play on PC and use my nice chunky gaming mouse.

One new button has been added to the right Joy-Con, the mysterious and much-talked-about “C” button that people have been theorising on for months. Turns out it launches a new feature called GameChat, which is a system-wide suite of communication tools, sort of like an in-built Discord app but with fun Nintendo embellishments like the ability to pair it with a camera and put a live feed of your face into games that support the feature. This is surprisingly forward-thinking, coming from a company that has historically been wary of online multiplayer and communication, and it’s cool that this is all built into the console rather than being off-loaded to a phone app.

However, one of the GameChat features seems to have a serious flaw: you can broadcast gameplay to friends in the same voice lobby—either the game you’re all playing together, or totally different games—and the frame rate in the footage they showed was awful. Like, sub-15 fps awful. I get that you’re not actually playing games this way, but it looks extremely uncomfortable even to watch. Maybe this is just a hardware limitation where the console can’t decode that much video while simultaneously displaying the game the console owner is actually playing, but that frankly makes me wonder if the feature is even worth implementing. If this isn’t a hardware limitation and it’s on the software side, Nintendo needs to fix it as soon as possible, because it makes them look bad.

The console’s screen has a few surprises, being capable of 120 frames per second on compatible games, and supporting High Dynamic Range and variable refresh rates. This was all thrown around in rumours a few weeks ago and I honestly didn’t believe it, given that Nintendo has eschewed graphical features for three generations now, so it’s a pleasant surprise to see them packing these kinds of capabilities into the Switch 2. The trade-off is that the screen is LCD rather than OLED, and as a huge OLED slut I get that that’s a little disappointing, but the original Switch’s LCD screen was surprisingly vibrant and sharp so I’m hoping we get the same quality here. (Plus, they will 100% sell a more expensive OLED model in a few years anyway).

How much will all of this cost? Four hundred and fifty dollarydoos, which translates to €470 here in Ireland. Some pessimists were predicting $500 while optimists were hoping for $400, but $450 is exactly what I was expecting; Nintendo never sells their hardware at a loss and there’s a lot of instability in the market right now due to Trump’s tariffs, so I figured they’d land in the middle to be safe. I am personally fine with this price.

The prices of the games is another matter altogether, but we’ll get to that later.

The Games

People love the original Switch, but it wasn’t particularly powerful even when it came out and has only become more obsolete with time. What I’m getting at here is that a lot of Switch games, even first-party Switch games developed by Nintendo, run like ass. Since the Switch 2 is backwards compatible, this raised the obvious possibility of enhanced versions of said ass-running Switch 1 games, and with it came a question: will Nintendo be consumer-friendly and make these upgrades free for anyone who owns the original game, or will they pull a Nintendo and charge for them?

The answer is…kind of unexpected. Yes, upgrading to these “Switch 2 Editions” costs money (how much money exactly has not been stated, which I assume is because the amount will make people angry), but the games also aren’t just getting technical upgrades—they have new features as well. Some of the games shown will be getting substantial new content, the sort of thing that you would expect a company to charge money for anyway, but the two Switch Zelda games’ “new content” consists of a weird phone app that will give you voice directions. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to play Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom like that, and I certainly don’t want to pay for the privilege.

Apparently, there will be some games with straightforward technical updates for free, like Pokemon Violet and Scarlet. That’s fine, but it makes me wonder: why not offer the same for these other games, and just charge for the additional content separately? Nintendo’s mindset here seems to be conflating resolution and framerate upgrades with DLC as though anyone who wants the former will also want the latter, but that’s absolutely not the case. If the argument is that charging for the upgrade is necessary to cover the cost of developing the new content, why not just not develop the new content? Is anyone going to buy a Switch 2 solely for new Mario Party Jamboree minigames? The whole thing feels like a massive case of executive head-in-ass syndrome.

(After writing this part of the post I found out that the two Zelda upgrades will be offered for free to Switch Online members, and it sounds like they won’t be the only ones. That’s a little better, but I think the complaints I outlined above still stand).

Similarly baffling is the Switch 2 Welcome Tour, a thing that educates new owners about various features of the console—including little engineering details that most people wouldn’t be aware of even while using it—and presents some mini-games that use the mouse sensors and the HD rumble and all of that. In other words, the sort of application you get for free with a Steam Deck or a VR headset, which you have fun with for fifteen minutes and then never launch again.

…Is what I would say, except this thing isn’t free. You’re going to have to pay $10 to download it. Like I said, Weird Nintendo Bullshit. This isn’t really a problem for me, as I will simply not buy the tech demo they’re charging money for, but charging for it, plus the paid upgrades, plus another piece of information I’ll comment on later, paint a disquieting picture.

Now, what about the new games? There were actually fewer of those than I expected, but I probably shouldn’t have expected much to begin with. Speaking as someone who’s been watching gaming showcases for a long time, they’ve definitely been trending lighter on the brand-new game announcements for a while now, across all platforms and publishers, likely due to development times ballooning. And Nintendo in particular has been in the habit since the beginning of the Switch’s lifecycle of drip-feeding game releases, sometimes even sitting on finished games for years, which I’ve always assumed is so they can strategically deploy them to plug content draughts (several of their consoles became infamous for having long spells without quality game releases). I would bet money they’ve still got at least one big-ish game for the end of the year that they didn’t announce during the presentation.

As far as launch titles go, Mario Kart World is the most notable announcement. It’s been a long time since we got a completely new Mario Kart game, and this one is going open world. I’m a huge fan of both Mario Kart and open-world racing games like Forza Horizon and Burnout Paradise, so this is basically my idea of a perfect game.

And you can play as a cow!

I’m also including the amazingly-titled Donkey Kong Bananza in the launch lineup, since it’s coming out just a bit over a month after the Switch 2. It’s not the new 3D Mario game I was hoping for, and unlike some people I don’t have any particular affection for DK, but the trailer makes the game look pretty sick, with large levels and fully-destructible environments. Based on the visual style I’m assuming it’s by the development team who made Mario Odyssey, and I’m down for anything they put out because that game was excellent.

Apart from those two, it’s a whole lot of ports with names like “Game Title: Up-Biggened Edition.” This is something Nintendo also did for the Wii U and Switch, getting ports of already-existing games that couldn’t run on their previous hardware generation and having the developers add some small new features to make them stand out. I assume these ports must sell or they wouldn’t keep doing them, so it’s probably a smart business move. Looking at the ports scheduled for launch, it’s all games that I’m either not interested in to begin with, already own on other platforms, or would prefer to play on more capable hardware, so while I’m sure some of these will get a lot of Switch 1 owners to upgrade, they’re not doing anything to entice me.

If that was all there was, I’d be leaning towards not getting a Switch 2 at launch. Mario Kart, a cool-looking Donkey Kong game and enhanced versions of Breath of the Wild and Tears of The Kingdom are pretty good, but they’re not quite enough to push me over the edge.

However.

Metroid Prime 4 is out this year, and it’s getting a Switch 2 Edition, and I’m such a huge Metroid Prime fan that if the game was Switch 2 exclusive I would pre-order the console the second it goes on sale, no hesitation. It’s one of those games that I would buy new hardware just to play. Would I buy a new console just for a graphically enhanced version of it? No, but add in Mario Kart and Donkey Kong and the enhanced Zeldas… I don’t know. As of the time of writing this post, I'm still on the fence, but I have a sinking feeling that I’m going to end up waiting for the pre-orders to open next week, debit card in hand.

Speaking of spending lots of money, let’s talk about the fact that these game prices are buck fucking wild.

Well, let me clarify that. Mario Kart World, in particular, is buck fucking wild, depending on what territory you live in. The €80 digital price puts it in line with what big “AAA” games cost on other platforms here in Ireland, so for me the price hike is a bit disappointing—I’m used to getting Switch games cheaper than PS5 or Xbox games—it’s not a deal-breaker. €90 for a physical edition of the game is kind of jaw-dropping if it’s accurate, as that would make it the most expensive game in modern history. Is Mario Kart worth that much money? I love Mario Kart, but I don’t think so.

(I say “if it’s accurate” because there seems to be some confusion as to whether the €90 physical price is actually real; as of the time of writing, the only retailer listing it for sale in Ireland has it at that price, but I don’t know if they got the MSRP from Nintendo or if this is a placeholder based on incorrect information)

I gather, from all the yelling and screaming, that this is a much bigger sticker shock for Americans and people in some other parts of the world than it is for me. Admittedly some of that yelling and screaming came from people conflating the European and American prices and jumping to incorrect conclusions, but the games are still expensive either way, and added onto the console being $50 more than people expected, the paid next-gen upgrades, accessories also being quite pricey, and the stupid tech demo, and it all adds up. And this is all before taking the new tariffs into account, which might raise the price of the console even further.

What’s up with the high prices? IGN put out an article talking to analysts that contains a lot of interesting speculation, but I want to zero in on this part:

McWhirter told me that this was Nintendo taking advantage of a critical moment of change in the games industry to test the waters on what the market will tolerate as far as game pricing goes. And it's using its most successful game series ever on that trial run, because Nintendo knows if any game can succeed at that price, it's Mario Kart. If it doesn't work out, it can always drop the price, either directly or indirectly through methods like Nintendo Switch Online subscriptions.

Game publishers have been slowly pushing prices upwards for a while now, waiting to see who’s going to pull the trigger first on breaking the $70 barrier, and this looks to me like Nintendo deciding to do it. That might be surprising if you only know the company second-hand as a family-friendly imagination factory, but behind the colourful mask they’ve long had a reputation for a very “corporate” mindset that prioritises profit margins over everything else. They and their shareholders are used to making a lot of money on their products, and with the Switch 1 they made a lot of money. They’re raising prices because they want to keep making that much money.

I hope I’m wrong about that and there is some pressing economic factor that necessitated this, because the alternative is that Nintendo has fallen into the trap that many console manufacturers have repeatedly blundered into: getting arrogant after a successful console generation, taking on the mindset that they can charge whatever they want because people will pay for it. The Playstation 3 and its infamous 599 US dollar price is the most widely-remembered example of this phenomenon, but Nintendo themselves have been afflicted with the curse of success multiple times in their history.

If it’s happened again, then they’ve clearly forgotten that the original Switch’s success wasn’t solely due to the hardware and the games, it was also due to customer goodwill. With the Switch 2 they are apparently willing to jettison that and rely solely on hardware and games to move units, which is a real shame because even if the game prices can’t be lowered, it would be very easy to get a drop of goodwill back. Bundle Mario Kart World with some free NSO membership, make the Zelda upgrades free, hell even just giving away the stupid tech demo instead of charging $10 for it would probably help. Looking at the online reactions, I don’t think it’s just the game prices that have people up in arms—it’s the game prices, and also the console is a bit more expensive than people were hoping for, and also the next-gen upgrades are behind a paywall, and also they’re charging $10 for a tech demo that really seems like it should be free. Removing even one of those pain points, even if it’s just the stupid tech demo that should be free, would probably help.

I guess I should comment on game graphics before moving. Nintendo doesn’t usually give out detailed hardware specs for new consoles and they haven’t done so this time either, so people have had to try and infer how powerful the Switch 2 is based on what the games we’ve seen look like.

Usually you’d turn to Nintendo’s first-party games for this, but that’s a trickier proposition this time because Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza seem to be using the system’s hardware for things other than raw graphical output. They’re both very nice looking and clearly couldn’t have run on the original Switch at anywhere near this resolution and frame rate, but Mario Kart is focusing on a big open world instead of providing a huge visual step up from Mario Kart 8 (although there is definitely a step up), and Donkey Kong has its destructible environments (with accompanying particle physics and animations) that’s probably eating a lot of the Switch 2’s graphical overhead. The Switch 2 version of Metroid Prime 4 looks stunning and it’s very impressive that it can run at 4K at a steady 60fps, but it’s also an enhanced version of a game built to run well on the Switch 1.

No, the real barometer for me is the port of Cyberpunk 2077. This is a game whose PS4 and Xbox One versions were barely functional, and whose DLC didn’t release for those platforms at all, so the fact that we’ve got the whole package on the Switch 2 is kind of unbelievable. And judging from the gameplay footage, it’s not the hugely-compromised version that the “miracle port” of The Witcher 3 on the original Switch was—it looks really good and is running at an acceptable frame rate.

Also of note is that Ubisoft is porting Star Wars Outlaws to the console. We only have a brief glimpse of Switch 2 footage so we don’t know how well it will run, but the fact that they’re attempting it at all says a lot. This isn’t even a nominally cross-platform game, this is a current-gen-only title that came out last year.

When the original Switch released eight years ago, the fact that it was running “real” console games on a handheld seemed like an impossible magic trick, which did a lot to obscure the fact that it was kind of wimpy—even Breath of the Wild, a cross-platform launch title, felt like it was pushing the console to its limits. Now that we’ve had several years of the Steam Deck and the other handheld PCs, that magic trick is no longer a novelty, and it’s encouraging that Nintendo seems to have recognised this. They got a long shelf life out of the Switch that saw it running a lot of games that people had confidently predicted would never come to the platform; if the Switch 2 has Cyberpunk and ports of current-gen open world games this early, who knows what it will be capable of after developers have had a few years to get to grips with it.

Lastly, there was one big surprise at the Switch 2 reveal event I want to talk about: a console exclusive game made by From Software, creators of Dark Souls and Elden Ring and, most importantly for the topic at hand, Bloodborne.

When this trailer first dropped, I and many other long-time From fans got very excited because it looked like Nintendo had just pulled off a major coup: essentially, it seemed for all the world like they had rolled a dump truck full of money up to From’s doorstep in order to secure a spiritual successor to Bloodborne, the company’s most fervently beloved game, which was been languishing on the PS4 for ten years. (Even though From developed it, the IP is owned by Sony, which means that From can’t port it, remaster it or make a sequel to it—all things their fanbase has been crying out for since basically the day it released—without Sony’s approval).

There is precedent for Nintendo doing this: during the Wii U era they got the publishing rights to Bayonetta, a game with a similar cult following that also seemed to have been abandoned by its original publisher and bankrolled an exclusive sequel. And before that they got the publishing rights to the cult classic Fatal Frame series, which they used to publish two console-exclusive sequels, which they… never released outside of Japan, pissing off the international Fatal Frame community and eventually causing the rights to lapse back to their original owner when the games didn’t sell very well.

Listen, Nintendo is weird.

The point is, this is a pretty sound strategy. Basically, Nintendo snaps up exclusivity rights to a “mature” game license, something that has a devoted fanbase but which isn’t a giant mainstream hit so it won’t be too expensive, and then puts out sequels that they can use to entice “hardcore” gamers onto their platform. Actually getting the rights to Bloodborne was likely impossible—Sony evidently still considers the game to be an important part of their portfolio even though they’re doing sweet fuck all with it—so the assumption was that this would an in-all-but-name spiritual successor, not using any of the setting or story concepts from Bloodborne (which don’t tend to persist all that much across From sequels anyway) but keeping the same gothic Victorian aesthetic and themes.

That is definitely the case to some extent—the trailer for The Duskbloods looks more like Bloodborne than some parts of Bloodborne do—but a few hours after this exciting reveal we got the unwelcome news that the game is actually an eight-player PvPvE multiplayer affair (that means you fight other players as well as computer-controlled enemies, for my non-gamer readers), not a primarily single-player action RPG like Bloodborne and most of From’s other games.

Personally, while I would have preferred a traditional From RPG, I’m pretty interested in The Duskbloods all the same. The interview Nintendo put out with director Hidetaki Miyazaki makes it sound like it’s more than just an arena fighter with NPCs, and if nothing else it could be a good lore delivery vehicle, which is half the reason I love Bloodborne so much anyway. From Nintendo’s perspective, while this won’t entice as many Fromheads to buy a Switch as “Bloodborne 2 with the serial numbers filed off” would have, it will still get a lot of them on board.

Conclusions

So after all of that blathering, what do I make of the Nintendo Switch 2?

Overall I’m very excited for it. I think it looks like a great piece of hardware, and while the relatively scanty launch lineup would have gotten me worried during the Wii or Wii U era, Nintendo’s efforts with the Switch to avoid game draughts have me pretty confident that we’re not going to have any major post-release gaps. Even apart from Nintendo themselves, there’s probably a lot more third parties developing ports than have been revealed (Ubisoft are notably absent apart from Star Wars Outlaws, for example).

Of course, I recognise that it’s easy for me to be excited for the launch of an expensive new console because I happen to be able to afford to buy it. That’s not the case for everyone, especially in certain territories where the Switch 2 is going to be much more expensive. Maybe some of that expense was outside of Nintendo’s control, but some of it definitely is within their control (like charging money for the stupid tech demo that should be free), and for that reason I don’t think they deserve the same fast road to success that they experienced with the original Switch. They’ll probably still get it, but I hope they don’t, for their sake as much as for ours.

Editor’s Note: After writing this post, Ronan caved and pre-ordered a Nintendo Switch 2. He is survived by his dog.