The Nintendo Switch 2 was announced today and it immediately made me nostalgic for the original Switch’s launch back in 2017.
Nintendo revealed the previous machine, the Nintendo Switch, on October 20, 2016 in a Nintendo Direct. It was in a weak position, due to low sales of the Nintendo Wii U, which sold only 13.56 million units compared to the earlier success of the Nintendo Wii, which sold over 101.6 million. of units.
This time, the reveal came in the form of a Nintendo Direct video lasting two minutes and 21 seconds, with no voiceover. It was released today at 5 a.m. PT. Years from now, I think we will all remember this moment as something special. It was a highly anticipated moment, no doubt watched around the world due to leaks, and at least we confirmed the official name: the Nintendo Switch 2. But if you were looking for much more, it’s a bit disappointing because we will have to wait for the next revelation in a rather long and slow marketing striptease.
In 2017, the overall game console industry was in good health. Sony’s PlayStation 4 was selling well and Microsoft was struggling to compete with the Xbox One. Nintendo’s world of cartoons and low-resolution games finally seemed to be grappling with the race for high-end 3D graphics started by other game consoles.
I’ve been covering the gaming industry on a daily basis since 1996, and every console launch always feels like a cultural moment. I’m nostalgic for launch times like the Nintendo GameCube, the original Xbox, the PlayStation 2, and just about every console introduced since. I miss the days when reveals took place at live events like E3 and sales were announced with midnight launches in stores.
Big games from the Switch launch included 1-2-Switch, a bunch of mini-games; The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; Just Dance 2017; Skylanders: Imaginators; Super Bomberman 3; My name is Setsuna; Cutting pliers; Knight with Shovel: Treasure; Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment; and fast RMX. The Zelda title was the most memorable, while the 1-2-Switch had cute games like Quick Draw that showed off the Switch’s uniqueness with the motion-controlled gunplay.
The Switch was officially launched on March 3, 2017 and it was a great success. The Switch was aimed at a wide audience of gamers through multiple modes of use both on the TV and on the go. It has become Nintendo’s best-selling game console with over 146 million units sold and 1.3 billion games played to date.
No one needed to write anything about how weak the video game industry is. Fast forward to now. Epyllion CEO and industry clairvoyant Matthew Ball released a 220-page slideshow This explains why the gaming industry has slowed down over the past two and a half years and companies have had to deal with 34,000 layoffs among gaming companies.
Venture capital investment is down, mobile gaming growth has stalled, the pandemic boom has petered out, and the industry has shrunk at a time when other industries are still growing. For this year, it will perhaps be the Switch 2 and Grand Theft Auto VI to save game sales.
Last time Nintendo had Zelda and now there will be the Mario Kart game, including up to 24 players in a race. The next news will arrive in a Nintendo Direct broadcast on April 2.
Nintendo has announced that it will hold a public hands-on tour of the Switch 2 in North America:
- New York, April 4 to 6, 2025
- Los Angeles, April 11 to 13, 2025
- Dallas, April 25 to 27, 2025
- Toronto, April 25 to 27, 2025
So far, Ball said in his deck that Switch sales have mostly benefited Nintendo. Switch users buy 25-33% fewer games than PlayStation/Xbox owners, and more than half of sales are Nintendo games compared to 10% on PS/Xbox. It is dominated by sales of titles like Mario Kart 8 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023).
Switch sales come not from net new players, but from the cannibalization of home console and handheld console sales. PlayStation and Xbox Series X/S sales are down after 49 months of sales. The Switch 2 will have to sell a lot to make up for these problems.
Now Nintendo will have to convince us if there’s enough new stuff here. For the Switch 2 to win, it will have to contend with the Steam Deck, which, as a sort of PC, has allowed the PC to gain market share over consoles in recent years. And Steam’s largest player base is now in Asia and China in particular, Ball said.
One of the challenges is the influx of new games onto the market. Steam now introduces as many new games in a year as in the entire lifespan of a Nintendo console.
Nintendo left a lot of questions open, as it didn’t disclose any specifications. He showed how Nintendo Joy-Con controllers can now be magnetically attached to the sides of the console, which is again a hybrid TV and handheld. It also featured a slightly larger screen and a sturdier stand. It will arrive sometime in 2025. Hopefully we will know more about the price and schedule at the next event.
As previously stated, I’m very interested in whether the Switch 2 specs will make cross-platform game development harder or easier. The Switch 2’s hardware will likely have similar capabilities to the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Steam Deck. This means that companies won’t need to create entirely separate versions of a game to run a title on the Switch 2.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Switch 2 was another smash hit. But we’ll find out in the coming months, as titles are revealed and the uniqueness of the Switch 2 is explained.
In the meantime, I look back nostalgically to the fun days of 2017, when the last machine was released.
