Following their Corporate Management Policy Briefing, Nintendo took to Twitter to announce that games for the Nintendo Switch will be compatible with what fans are tentatively calling the Switch 2. This bit of news was tucked into a larger document available on Nintendo’s website, which goes into great detail about where Nintendo stands in the gaming hardware market. Impressively, they’ve sold 146 million units of the Nintendo Switch Family so far, a testimony to its popularity across generations. The briefing also assures us that the Nintendo Switch Online service will carry over to their new console.
If you’re more familiar with the way Microsoft and Sony handle backward compatibility, this move might not come as a big shock. Microsoft’s Xbox has long excelled in this arena, offering features like FPS Boost and Resolution Boost for older games on new consoles. Sony, on the other hand, has been a bit more conservative since the PS3 days. That console could play all previous PlayStation titles, but nowadays, the PS5 supports PS4 games pretty thoroughly, with some PS2 and PS1 titles available via emulation. However, PS3 games are stuck in the realm of cloud streaming, which isn’t the most popular option for PlayStation fans.
Nintendo’s track record with backward compatibility has been pretty solid until the launch of the Switch. The Wii U could run Wii and GameCube discs and offered a Virtual Console that bridged most gaps in Nintendo’s vast library. The 3DS, although limited to playing DS games, kept a part of this tradition alive. But with the introduction of the Switch, which unified Nintendo’s handheld and home consoles and shifted to Arm CPU cores, backward compatibility was sacrificed. The choice seems to have paid off, given the Switch’s success with its Nvidia-powered mobile hardware. As a result, folks buying games now won’t have to fret over their playability on Switch 2 in the future.
This announcement also brings hope that games previously hampered by the original Switch’s hardware limitations, like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, might finally be experienced in all their glory at over 60 FPS. All this comes amid Nintendo’s efforts to suppress emulation software, likely due to concerns that, much like Dolphin emulated GameCube and Wii games, unregulated Switch emulators could handle both Switch and Switch 2 games without batting an eye.
