Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Nintendo has had a trend for the past couple decades of releasing "sequel" consoles that are essentially a modernized version of the old one with extra features, compatible with everything that released on the predecessor.

With all three major console manufacturers prioritizing backwards compatibility, and the rise in PC gaming (universally backwards compatible), people are starting to catch on to the fact that old games don't "expire" after 10 years. I wouldn't be surprised if backwards compatibility just becomes the standard for all gaming consoles going forward.

Tangential, but I'm also interested in seeing how games that released on old consoles and are continued to be played, like Fortnite, will support aging hardware. I don't like that Epic can one day announce the game just no longer works on that console, rendering your purchases null and void until you upgrade your hardware, but I can't expect them to update that version of the game forever.

> I don't like that Epic can one day announce the game just no longer works on that console, rendering your purchases null and void until you upgrade your hardware, but I can't expect them to update that version of the game forever.

Traditionally for these "Live Service"-type games, they announce cutting support for a console, but let you carry your purchases in that specific game (subscription, add-on items, etc), forward to the same game on the next gen of that console.

For example, how Final Fantasy 14 ended PS3 support - https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/-i-final-fantas... and how Grand Theft Auto 5 ended PS3 support - https://www.ign.com/articles/gta-online-support-ending-xbox-...

It's not a guarantee, but I'd expect something similar for Fortnite.

Games don't have the generational differences they used to. They're mature now. Tech is rarely the blocker anymore. The Switch was "underpowered" at release and is even more underpowered now but the space of "games that would run well on the Switch" is still fairly unexplored, not because anybody is bad but because the space is so big now.

That hardware can no longer compete with platforms that don't throw away their entire library on every release is probably one of the first impacts of games finally maturing. My "next console" was a Steam Deck for partially this very reason, the fact that it came preloaded with years of previous acquisitions.

We're also just seeing the leading edge of the game industry having to deal with the fact that it now has to compete against itself. There's been a number of articles about how $NEW_GAME never even reached a peak player count of something like Skyrim. I think that's currently being written as a sort of a "ha ha, that's sorta funny", but it represents a real problem. It is not unsolvable; Hollywood has always faced this issue and it has historically managed to make money anyhow. But I think AAA gaming is only just beginning to reckon with the fact that they aren't going to get a "free reset" on every console generation. $NEW_GAME really is is competition with Skyrim now, along with a lot of other things. It's not a joke, it's an emerging reality the industry is going to have to grapple with.

> prioritizing backwards compatibility

Backwards compatibility is very "cheap" these days though? With no arcane architectures and chip designs. PS5 and Xbox are basically just generic PCs running a restricted OS and Switch is just a phone/tablet.

"Nintendo has had a trend for the past couple decades of releasing "sequel" consoles that are essentially a modernized version of the old one with extra features, compatible with everything that released on the predecessor."

Isnt it pretty much just the Wii and Wii U? I guess you could play GameCube disks on a Wii but calling the Wii a modernized version of the GameCube is a real stretch.

Although the handhelds have been backwards compatible, only the Wii and the Wii U had backwards compatibility. The SNES, N64, Gamecube and Switch did not have backwards compatibility.

Either that, or you've gotten older. The young always want to play that one specific NEW game. Currently that usually means PS5, either Fortnite or Call Of Duty (and yes that one specific version). PS5 only has PS4 backward compatibility, and it isn't going to be emulated any time soon.

Wii, Wii U, GBC, GBA, DS, 3DS all had backwards compatibility.

In addition to supporting GameCube discs, the Wii had physical ports for plugging in GameCube controllers and memory cards. So, not much of a stretch.

That's exactly what they called it when its internals became known: an enhanced Gamecube with waggle controls.

The graphics chip was even fixed-function, like the Gamecube's, not shader-based like the Xbox 360 or PS3.

Fortnite and Call of Duty are not great examples given they both still run on the PS4. Even the latest Call of Duty iteration that launched barely two weeks ago still runs on last generation consoles, because there's still so many players who haven't felt the need to upgrade to the successor generation after four years.

I don't think there's ever been a console generation before where the last generation was still getting big new releases this deep into the next one. The PS5 Pro is out now and the PS4 is still getting new games.

GB/GBc/GBa, DS/3DS (we don't talk about DSi) come to mind if you count them as consoles. You can even play GBa in the original DS, but not in the 3DS as far as I know.

> The graphics chip

The graphics architecture was even the same between Wii and GameCube - ATI's Flipper, just with 50% higher clocks on the Wii.

League of Legends and Minecraft came out ~15 years ago and never left the top 10 most played PC games.

It's hard to release new live-service games too. Many people will just be happy to play LoL for the rest of their lives.

The Wii Hardware was also basically a beefed up GameCube. Plus the Wiimote.

fortnite battle royale came out in 2017... hardly new at this point i think

I said "past couple decades" for a reason. The N64 is pushing 30

Yeah but the only discernible difference to most gamers from last gen to this gen is load times… the ps5 pro side by side to a ps5 screenshot of an enhanced game vs the unenhanced version is crazy.

> PS5 only has PS4 backward compatibility, and it isn't going to be emulated any time soon.

But that compatibility is not achieved with emulation, right?

The PS6 can hopefully keep compatibility with PS5 and PS4 in a similar way. Unless we are nearing some sort of ARM horizon for consoles, that is.

> Unless we are nearing some sort of ARM horizon for consoles, that is.

The documents accidentally leaked from the FTC vs. Microsoft trial revealed that Microsoft was at least considering switching to an ARM CPU with the next Xbox generation, but they hadn't decided yet at the time those documents were written. Either way they would still use an AMD GPU, so it would be AMD+AMD or ARM+AMD.

Most folks now play one, or a couple, of live service games and that is about it.

A platform inside the platform.

That is why console sales are so bad, in comparison with previous generations growth sales.

It is cheap only if you don't change CPU or GPU architectures. This is why the PS4 doesn't have PS3 compatibility.

When apple switched to ARM even with x64->ARMv8 translation layer (NOT emulating) it was still noticeably slow in a lot of software. Even though some x64 games worked on ARM macs they still lost A LOT of performance.

The backwards compatibility of the PS2 was due to the PS2 literally including an extra PS1 CPU (technically PS1-like CPU underclocked to match the original PS1 CPU when running PS1 games). On PS2 games this PS1 CPU handled only I/O so it wasn't completely wasted when running PS2 games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2_technical_specif...

The PS2 CPU is a MIPS III while the PS1 CPU is a MIPS I. I am not an expert but I think but I think MIPS III is only backwards compatible to MIPS II, not MIPS I

"The young always want to play that one specific NEW game."

And people want to see that specific one NEW movie, too, not even just "the young". Even now, after all that has happened, Hollywood can still put butts in theater seats for a new movie, even though the attendees probably average several dozen movies at home and probably still have literally hundreds of movies they would enjoy as much or more than the one they are watching in the theater. A lengthy essay could be written on why, which I'll let someone else write.

But I can promise you from personal experience that a 2024 gamer has an easier time picking up and enjoying a 2014 game than a 2004 gamer would have picking up a 1994 game, to the point that it is not even close.

Checking a list of games from 2014... heck, I've got personal proof, my young teen recently started Shadows of Mordor. While it didn't "stick" (we got Skyrim somewhat after that and that has stuck, however, while initial release is 2011 on that the history is complicated and I won't complain if someone wants to forward-date that at least a bit), he wasn't like "oh my gosh this looks so bad and the QoL is so terrible I can't play this anymore". Others from 2014 include Super Smash Bros Wii U, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and The Last Of Us: Left Behind. Really not that dissimilar from what is being put out today.

Whereas 2004 to 1994 is the delta between Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas and Sonic 3 and Knuckles. That's huge. Yes, I'm old enough to have been there and I can you from personal experience that in 2004 "Sonic 3 and Knuckles" was very definitely legacy in a way that The Last Of Us: Left Behind is not. If you tell someone today that you just started the latter, they might wonder why you're late to the party but they're not going to think anything more of it.

The 3DS actually has a GBA CPU that was used when Nintendo gave some free GBA games away to early 3DS buyers after they lowered the price, as a sort of refund for the difference in prices. You can access it now buy jailbreaking your 3DS, but if you have a New 3DS, emulation on the main CPU is more convenient.

You must have some very old young.

The young I know play free mobile games they downloaded from clickbait ads.

And in fact bug for bug compatible.

They even released a version of the wii without the gamecube ports or compatability (before the wii mini) which immediately supports gamecube games again if you solder the ports back on.

Similar situation with the Wii U. It was technically capable of natively running GameCube games, but Nintendo locked out the functionality. It can enabled with homebrew.

Lucky for you Fortnite is and always has been a free game. If you were foolish enough to pay to dress up your characters well then thank you for supporting that business model so I can let my kids play for free. Power to you if you can afford to drop money on digital clothing for a game you spend on what ever you like. But I just see it as bad a smoking. Kids are like junkies wanting to buy clothing for a game mean while them and their parents are living in rags. It’s an addiction and kids are put up against their peers or will be on the outside if they can’t get the latest skin. So stupid it went that way and any game that has kids playing it should not allow in game purchases like that.

Case in point: I just bought Diablo 3 (released in 2012) on Switch the other day.

I'm sure D4 is more modern, but the difference from D3 is nowhere near D2->D3 for the same time span (12 years).

From what I've heard only about 4% of CoD: BO6 buyers were on PS4. It might finally be getting to the point where it just no longer makes sense to craft an entirely different version for the older consoles. Perhaps Switch 2 getting CoD will keep the PS4 version on life support however.

>not because anybody is bad but because the space is so big now.

I completely agree but I would actually extend this principle even more aggressively. Even if, for whatever reason, we were hard capped technologically at Windows 98, even that space could be fruitfully explored practically without end, creating new genres, new stories, new games.

Fiction writing carries on just fine in books, and music has certainly benefited from new tech and new methods but there would always be music even if that weren't the case, and same with cinema. I would put tabletop games in this category too. Its continued future viability, independent of future tech advancements may be an important factor in settling whether its art.

Full credit to Nintendo for recognizing they had plenty of unused creative space to play in, and choosing to play by different rules.

Technically, so did the SNES with the NES, it was just never really exposed. SMB all-stars started as SMB3 running directly on SNES. And you had the Super GameBoy, but that was little more than a GameBoy in a cartridge.

yeah and the DS had a GBA cartridge slot.

>(we don't talk about DSi)

New 3DS crying in the corner because it didn't even get a side mention, which about matches the number of exclusives it had.

It's true that the progress in games is much slower now, but I believe in the console world the main factor is hardware.

Consoles used to have very bespoke architectures, but now are switching to customized versions of relatively off-the-shelf components. Both the PS5 and the last XBox use x86 AMD CPU+GPU combos, probably a variation of their regular G product line.

Shoot, they don't need a hardware generation to do that. ActiBlizz told everyone who spent $40 on Overwatch "Fuck you, go play a different game".

You're absolutely spot-on!

I've been organizing LAN parties with my friends for 26 years now and around 2010 to 2016 was the time when games became so good that stopped making sense to upgrade in-between LAN parties.

- Left 4 Dead 2

- Killing Floor 2

- CS:GO

- Grid 2

- GTA V

- StarCraft II

plus nowadays there's stiff free competition, e.g.

- Rocket League

- Brawlhalla

- Dota 2

- LoL

but also from OpenRA, which modernizes Red Alert.

Plus, it's challenging to tell based on screenshots if you're looking at Assassin's Creed III (from 2012) or Assassin's Creed Mirage (from 2023) and there's been 7 !!! other Assassin's Creed games in between.

And looking at the Switch, I'd say the situation for new games is brutal. There's lots of evergreen games with great replay-ability and thanks to the cartridges you can easily borrow them among a group of friends. It's been a while since I last bought a new one because there just wasn't anything different enough from what I already have and like.

My biggest wish for the Switch has been that it'll one day drive my screen at 144Hz to make movement smooth. And it looks like Nintendo is going to deliver exactly that: More powerful hardware for the same old games.

I wonder if Nintendo will also eventually be forced to implement a subscription model and/or if they will start to aggressively push older games without updates out of their store (like what Apple does) because otherwise I just don't see many openings for developers to build a new Switch game and make the financials work. Currently, you're competing with a back catalogue of 4,747 games, so good luck finding anything where you can stand out by being better.

I always find interesting the issue regarding PC gaming on the rise, because in the Iberian Penisula game consoles never were that big.

We grew from the 8 bit home computers, lived through 16 bit home computers and settled in PC gaming.

Nintendo was mostly about those game & watch handhelds, naturally SEGA and PlayStation became relevant, replaced by XBox and PlayStation, but always on the shadow of PC gaming.

Incorrect. The Wii is far more similar to the Gamecube than the WiiU.

or roblox

DSi XL (LL) is actually my favorite way to play DS games because the screen is huge (and IPS!) but is in the native DS resolution of 256×192 pixels. DS games on 3DS-derivatives look like blurry garbage because they get scaled up to 320×240px for display on the 3DS's 800×240px (400×240px per eye) panel.

The SNES and the Gamecube did have the Super Game Boy and Game Boy Player respectively though, but I'd probably count that as sideward compatibility rather than backward compatibility.

If you hold down the start button while booting a DS game then the 3DS will render it with 1:1 pixels instead of ugly scaling, but then you're not using the whole display so a DSi XL is still better.

Uh no you're wrong. They'll play LOL for the rest of their lives indeed, but not happily. /s

Microsoft has been working on perfecting x86 emulation on ATM so it's not far fetched to think they could still keep backwards compatibility.

It's definitely the case for Fortnite, but it still doesn't sit well with me that a service bought on specific hardware can just be taken away with no recourse. I'm not sure what if anything can or should be done about it, but it's weird knowing that many of the most popular PS4 games will be straight up unplayable in a few years

Backlog doesn't seem to intimidate people off of Steam, so it's not a huge concern for smaller publishers. It's the big publishers trying to break into multiplayer that have hurdles to jump through. Just look at Concord: an "okay" game with few glitches and high quality graphics that probably would've done well had it not come out after a half dozen games did it better.

Depends on the level of hardware access.

If the GPU access is through a relatively "thick" API like DX/Vulkan and shaders stored in an intermediate representation like DXIL or SPIR-V, sure, swapping out the hardware implementation is relatively easy.

But if they're shipping GPU ISA binaries as the shaders, you'll have a much harder time ensuring compatibility.

Same with things like synchronization, on both the CPU and GPU (and any other offload devices like DSPs or future NPUs). If they use API-provided mechanisms, and those are used /correctly/, then the implementation can likely be changed. But if they cycle-count and rely on specific device timing, again all bets are off.

Things like DX12 and Vulkan have a large number of sync points and state transition metadata to allow different implementations to be "correct" in things like cache or format conversions (like compression). Not all those transitions are required for every vendor's hardware, and we regularly see issues caused by apps not "correctly" using them when the spec says it's required, as the vendor's hardware they happened to test on didn't require that one specific transition that another implementation might, or they happened across some timing that didn't happen to hit issues.

I guess my point is Compatibility is hard even if the APIs are intentionally designed to allow it. I have no idea how much the idea of such compatibility has been baked into console APIs in the first place. One of the primary advantages of consoles is to allow simplifications allowed by targeting limited hardware, so I can only assume they're less compatibility focused than the PC APIs we already have Big Problems with.

The Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) had backwards compatibility with the Master System. Unlike the Super Game Boy, the Power Base Converter was barely more than a cartridge pass-through adapter. The Mega Drive’s 68000 is idled and its Z80 sound co-processor takes control as the main CPU.

https://segaretro.org/Power_Base_Converter

> the space of "games that would run well on the Switch" is still fairly unexplored

That's not true at all, many games don't bother with the Switch at all because of dev costs, and Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the world, is struggling on the Switch. I know because I play FN on Switch occasionally, and you can quite literally see all the pain that went into making all that complexity work at approx 25fps.

Even Nintendo can't make the latest Zeldas run at >30fps, and they're relatively low fidelity.

I'm surprised there isn't a 3DS mod to bodge in a fancy modern panel with enough DPI to hit the lowest common multiple of those screens' resolutions, such that it can pull off a full-coverage integer-scaled mode for both DS and 3DS games. (There certainly exist enough mods that do this for GB/GBC!)

> Technically, so did the SNES with the NES, it was just never really exposed.

I've always wondered how true this is — I feel like if it was literally true, we'd see a lot of NES ROMhacks that involve editing the ROM's layout and metadata bits just enough that it's now a SNES ROM, and then taking advantage of SNES capabilities in the mod. But I don't believe I've ever seen something like that.

I do understand that the SNES CPU is basically a "very extended" 6502; and that the SNES PPU's default-on-boot graphics mode is compatible with drawing NES-PPU-formatted CHR-ROM data; and that there's a "legacy compatibility" joypad input MMIO in the right place in address space to allow a game that was programmed for the NES to read the "NES subset" of a SNES controller's buttons.

But is the SNES's (variant) 65C816 ISA a strict superset of the NES's (variant) 6502 ISA? Or would they have had to effectively go through the assembly code of SMB3 with a fine-toothed comb, fixing up little compatibilities in the available instructions here and there, to get it to run on the SNES?

(Though actually, even if they did have to do that, I imagine it would be still be possible to automate that process — i.e. it would be theoretically possible to write a NES-to-SNES static transpiler. In fact, it's so seemingly-tenable, that I'm a bit surprised to have never heard of such a project!)

Factorio on a Pentium pro sounds very tricky to do effectively. Half Life still is great but the graphics in HL2 make it more immersive. That's slowed but I wouldn't cite 98 for that.

> That hardware can no longer compete with platforms that don't throw away their entire library on every release is probably one of the first impacts of games finally maturing. My "next console" was a Steam Deck for partially this very reason, the fact that it came preloaded with years of previous acquisitions.

This was something that confused me about the concept of consoles in the 90s. The nonexistent value proposition of a console hasn't changed since then.

I assume they serve two purposes:

(1) They're marketed as toys you might buy for someone as a gift.

(2) You might own a console if you don't want to own a computer.

Purpose (2) seems to have withered and died.

> There's been a number of articles about how $NEW_GAME never even reached a peak player count of something like Skyrim. I think that's currently being written as a sort of a "ha ha, that's sorta funny", but it represents a real problem. It is not unsolvable; Hollywood has always faced this issue and it has historically managed to make money anyhow.

One major aspect of copyright law is making it difficult for people to consume media from the past.

> I've been organizing LAN parties with my friends for 26 years now

> - StarCraft II

I thought Starcraft II didn't allow LAN play?

RISC-V makes the most sense. It means they wouldn't be locked into one CPU supplier. Requiring a GPU based on RISC-V (or a separate open GPU ISA) could further insulate them from the current AMD lock-in.

It's like how mobile games can stop supporting old phones. e.g. Hearthstone

The Mac is a weird counter example here, the move to 64 bits resulted in many games with official Mac ports (e.g. most of Valve's: Half Life, Portal, etc) no longer being able to run on modern versions of OSX

babe. there were so many stupid toys and collectibles for kids until the 2000s. chill out lol

I stopped playing games in 2020 and when I started again late 2024 it was as if nothing has changed since say 2017. The most popular games are still very popular today. I think the reason for this is that I don't play games alone anymore. I always spend time playing with a friend I already know. All those single player games that come and go don't interest me.

I wonder how much effort it really takes to release a game for both PS4 and PS5, especially if you're already building it for Xbox and PC. PC requires you to support a wide array of performance capabilities, at least in theory making it easy to scale back performance to a previous-gen console; and they're probably still using an evolution of the same engine they were using for PS4, so at least to my mind it's a checkbox, some performance tuning and a bunch of QA. (at least in theory). maybe some different servers to support multiplayer - but since CoD supports cross play maybe not even that.

This results in better games with more content, and every game releasing on every platform.

The games on the Wii might have been super novel, and innovative, but most of them were kind of junk that wouldn't pass today. Now most new games seem to come with 100+ hours of content and extremely polished gameplay. Rather than building 4 games for 4 platforms, you can spend 4x more to develop one game.

It's an emerging reality, but it will be sustained by the market of kids and adult-kids who need "new thing" to play, and have a group of friends in the same boat.

I've said before that I've got a list of games going back 20-odd years that I'd like to play through in retirement, so I'm not the target market, but for online multiplayer games there needs to be a player base that makes it worthwhile, and the swarms are fickle and fast-moving. Helldivers 2 being a recent example to where a large community swarmed.

Having said that, and as someone else pointed out, enduring games like Fortnite will have to cut off certain aging hardware at some point if it's to remain a viable magnet to the swarms.

Aside: I used to go to LANs back in the Quake2 days, and was annoyed with Counterstrike because it essentially halved the player pool of Q2 FFA fragfests. The fragmentation of the market has only continued since then, but the market has also greatly increased in size. I did very much enjoy the unchained chaos of large scale Q2/Q3 FFA and Rocket Arena. Good times.

There's at least one such effort, Project Nested: https://github.com/Myself086/Project-Nested

Agreed, and 4 years into PS5, the onus on making the PS4 a "quality" experience is lower, vs. just giving PS4 owners "something" to play e.g. in developing markets where people mightn't have upgraded yet.

An analogy I might draw is the FIFA games, where FIFA 14 came out on the PS4 and PS3, but also the PS2 and Wii, which were just roster updates of previous years (no new gameplay features whatsoever), and clearly that was acceptable to enough people to give EA the trouble of developing, printing and distributing.

(3) Play console-exclusive games (or they want to play online with their friends who do)

(4) Don't have money for computer (there is a lot of overlap here, a PC may or may not be cheaper in cases for a given perf level)

(5) Gift bought by non tech-savvy family member

(6) Do own a computer, but just want a different and more plug and play device to relax with after staring at said computer for 10 hours a day

I don't think (1) and (5) are different ideas?

> Hollywood has always faced this issue and it has historically managed to make money anyhow.

It's harder for video games, because movies take only a couple hours to finish, and you generally want something you haven't seen before each movie night. Video games can take hundreds of hours to play to completion, and some games you can enjoy replaying tens of thousands of times. So the competition from the existing games library is very tough.

Small SC II events still get referred to as “LAN” often because, while it requires an online connection, it’s still the same vibe/format: a bunch of boxes in a room.

You can play at a LAN party so long as your network is connected to internet

So yes, technically not a LAN game, but in practical terms any modern LAN party also probably has internet. It's not the hurdle it used to be.

(7) get super uncomfortable sitting in the office chair all day and just want to play on the couch with the TV.

This exactly. NVN is lower level than dx12/Vulkan and is probably more comparable to Sony's graphics APIs in terms of how low level it is.* And even if the NVN version itself remained the same, consoles use precompiled shaders as you say, so unless you keep that API stable between generations as well you are going to need to do some form of translation between the new and old APIs.

* I've never used NVN but I imagine it must be very low level otherwise developers would not be using it instead of Vulkan which is also supported by the Switch. Feel free to correct me here or clarify if I'm right on this.