Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]

Iterating instead of throwing out everything with each new version. There is a part of me that is going to miss the, do weird shit and see what works, Nintendo that brought us some really fun ideas. But a stable Nintendo just being able to continue putting out great games has its advantages.

I am curious about the specs, but honestly don't care much. The only real issue the Switch had was being able to keep up with some of the games put on it with FPS but it still had beautiful games (like Tears of the Kingdom). So as long as it is actually a decent spec bump I am happy and have zero care to compare it to the other consoles (but I am sure people are going too and scream that it is "underpowered").

The biggest thing I am curious about, will it be OLED since that will be disappointing to go back to non OLED from the OLED Switch. And Price.

A bit of an aside, but... Tears of the Kingdom looks just awful to me. My kids played Breath of the Wild and when they got Tears of the Kingdom I walked in and was astonished at the graphic quality. I think I had just finished Doom 2016 at the time and I felt like I was rewinding the clock 15 years in graphical quality. I've heard literally zero other people have this complaint, so I suspect it's just my take on the aesthetics of the game.

I think the state-of-the-art on Switch is really Panic Button's work on the Doom and Doom Eternal ports, but those are frame locked at 30 FPS, so I think getting a spec bump in Switch 2 would certainly help the demographic that plays games like that. My family has left the Switch ecosystem for Steam Deck, and that does a lot better. Would be interesting to compare with the Switch 2 in terms of specs.

  Game Boy Color: plays original Game Boy games
  Game Boy Advance: plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color games
  Nintendo DS: plays Game Boy Advance games
  Nintendo DSi: plays Nintendo DS games
  Nintendo 3DS: plays Nintendo DS and DSi games
  Nintendo New 3DS: plays Nintendo DS, DSi, and (old) 3DS games
  Nintendo Wii: plays GameCube games
  Nintendo Wii U: plays Wii games

Also had VC for most of Nintendo's platform.

My whole family shares and island in animal crossing, firing up some arcade brawlers on the couch. We’ve been playing the hell out of our switch for years and never once have we complained that it’s not flashy enough.

You must have good eyes! I've played through both and would be hard-pressed to tell a scene from BotW from TotK at a glance.

If you're a hacker-type person who has already digitized your gamecube collection (or, let's be honest, downloaded the games illegally) then this doesn't matter. But for regular consumers, there needs to be a way to verify ownership.

Nintendo could have made some titles available digitally (which is what I wish they'd done), but that requires getting content rights sorted out for games that have never been sold digitally before, so the full catalog would not have been available. Also, there would have been a ton of hemming and hawing about "Nintendo is making me buy my Gamecube games again?!?" No comment on whether such complaints would have been reasonable.

If you have issues with it it's entirely with the style, the graphics are fine.

Nearly all Nintendo (game freak is not technically Nintendo) games look beautiful thanks to having a great art style instead of just focusing on higher polygon count.

I know HN doesn't have any room for sarcasm but I couldn't not laugh trying to remember what were the NEW 3ds games. Sure the second pad made the 3DS way more comfortable to play, and 3D was a bit better, but we all got scammed here regarding games supporting this new hardware.

But let's be real, it's Super Metroid. :)

Modding your Wii-U to run those roms?

I feel that probably qualifies someone to be regarded as a hacker -type

Most of their home consoles were complete departures from previous hardware.

NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube all did not work with prior games were fairly different (ok admittedly the outward difference between the NES and the SNES were minimal but still no compatability).

So honestly I think it was more notable that the Wii could play Gamecube games than the other way around as far as Nintendo's track record goes.

Loading screens are hidden, it's not like the contemporaneous PS2 game Mafia where you wait a few minutes to load, spend a few minutes driving across town on a mission to shoot up some people at a restaurant, get yourself shot up, then have to wait for it to load all over again.

The specs seems to be leaked here <https://thegamepost.com/nintendo-switch-2-full-specs-appears...>

TL;DR

- CPU: Arm Cortex-A78C 8 cores Unknown L1/L2/L3 cache sizes

- GPU: Nvidia T239 Ampere 1 Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC) 12 Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) 1534 CUDA cores 6 Texture Processing Clusters (TPC) 48 Gen 3 Tensor cores 2 RTX ray-tracing cores

- RAM: 12 GB LPDDR5

They want good graphics but the Switch can't handle them, but they still try to make them.

For example, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet.

Gameplay and the game design for me personally is really great, but I can't stand the graphics. I would rather play on worse graphics just to not have constant frame drops and in some parts of the game N64 graphics and in some 4K ones.

Was heavily rumoured/leaked and this teaser video literally shows them gliding along a surface.

How Nintendo will leverage that functionality, who could honestly say, but that’s the genius of keeping a toy company mindset in an industry full of sports car company mindsets.

First-party Nintendo titles are more or less the only games that actually manage to "push the envelope" on the Switch, and that's because they have the resources and experience to do it. Even then, some games end up constrained compared to the original vision, because the hardware can't handle it no matter how much insider knowledge you have about how it works and how to use it right.

It's how they can keep putting out essentially the same games but are completely different.

1. https://youtu.be/2u6HTG8LuXQ

AAA gaming on the other hand, either resembles sports, shallow short-form media, or Oscar-bait melodrama. Very little fun to be had.

What ever happened to fun and play?

Unity also kinda killed playing indie games on a laptop (at least on battery) on x86...

It’s indefensible considering how much legendary IP that potato is holding hostage.

https://www.polygon.com/nintendo-switch-2/509821/nintendo-sw...

Any actual game devs wanna chime in on whether that’s enough to actually do any ray tracing?

> If you're a hacker-type person who has already digitized your gamecube collection (or, let's be honest, downloaded the games illegally)

Either way, I disagree with your definition too.

The ”hacker-type” is the one figuring out how to mod the wii-u. The one following some instructions to perform it using provided tools is simply a end user.

Generally speaking, no, it doesn't actually affect things, and in several cases (e.g. the Game Boy, the Wii, and the Switch come to mind) the objectively 'worse' console (from a tech perspective) was more successful by a country mile.

Except the ones they remaster for us for $70.

The biggest advantage of owning a New 3DS turned out to be the huge performance uplift. A fair number of games ran at double the framerate or only supported 3D mode on the newer hardware. Code Name STEAM had substantially less downtime on the New models because the AI could process turns faster. Several reviews for Hyrule Warriors Legends flat out said not to buy the game unless you had a "New" model due to performance issues.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-pokemon-scarle...

Can't find it right now, but someone did some side by side comparisons of Scarlet/Violet next to similar Breath of the Wild scenes, and it's night and day.

I have two teenagers (15 & 17) and this is exactly right. My son plays games all the time and although he's played Elden Ring and GTA and other games of that sort, over the years I would say 80% of his time has been Minecraft and this other 2D game with a platformer vibe whose name I forget that has procedurally generated maps. He's frequently calling me over to his computer to check out his latest architectural creation in Minecraft. I know it's not just him, because he plays multiplayer with his buddies as well, and again, a lot of it is these games with quite frankly primitive graphics. But they're fun!

On one hand, the base architecture is Ampere, but it's been repeatedly rumored that there are various backports from Lovelace. It's a weird mixture of the two, alone with some unique parts never seen elsewhere (a file decompression engine that accelerates LZMA, according to kernel commits).

It's hard to say then how powerful these raytracing cores are, or how many are even necessary for simple but beautiful effects. It's also worth remembering that the Switch bakes the graphics drivers into the game itself, uses data structures and shaders more native to the GPU without compilation, and has a custom low level graphics API called NVN (and NVN2), so performance is not necessarily linear compared to a PC.

Most people think the “console” battle is between PlayStation and Xbox, and that PlayStation is the winner.

This is probably a big win for PlayStation’s marketing team.

The melodramatic storylines are also pretty grating, there are a few games with good storytelling but most are some rehash of "this world has been destroyed/is in the process of being destroyed, in the aftermath a hero is about to rise and save it" so if the mechanics don't feel fun right from the get-go I lose interest completely.

The most fun I have with games are the ones with a very iterative game loop (roguelikes for example), or social/multiplayer games, anything with a lot of replayability, and the constant feeling of improvement is like crack to me.

A surprising example I re-discovered last year after only playing it for a while some 15 years ago is Trackmania, got even some friends hooked on it to play hot seating trying to beat each others time. The game loop is short and intense (about 1-2 minutes max), has a high skill ceiling, and you feel yourself getting better at a track each time you play it, nailing some very tricky part that felt impossible 30 min before is absurdly satisfying.

Have you ever tried to use physical media with a Steam deck?

Have you ever tried to get 5 hours of battery life with a Steam deck?

Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket? (I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.)

Nintendo will be just fine. I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.

Yeah, I've always felt that Nintendo being willing to try out cool stuff is something that will be very sad to lose. The Wii, DS, and the Switch have all been very cool consoles. I personally only buy Nintendo consoles, as I feel like everything else eventually gets ported to PC anyways.

the GBC games just didnt fit well in the DS

Terraria?

But sure, if you hate Steam on principle then obviously it isn't for you. In my 19 years of using steam I've never had any problems though, and I suspect that's true for most people.

IMO the focus of cutting edge triple-A graphics is physically based rendering.

Some of my favorite UX features in newer games are automatically and contextually reminding you how the controls work when you pick it back up after a while, and quick story recaps or quest reminders on loading screens. I like to label those games "parent-friendly".

Can you dock a Switch Lite with a TV?

3DS has like ~15, though some heavy hitters (Xenoblade and Fire Emblem), DSi has like 6 no-names (and, technically, a whole lot on DSiWare); but there are many GBC-exclusive games.

Some of that is Valves' to fix, but some other things are just "that's how PC games are" — I genuinely can't believe "render the UI at native screen resolution, but the game at arbitrary different one" is not a standard feature in 2024.

I don't mind my game running at 720p, if I still can view the text and UI at native 4K; but apparently this is just not possible to get on PC.

It's something that is up to the game developer to implement but it is becoming more and more common to see in games now.

As the sibling post mentions, they all have exclusives, however, which is something Sony has refused to allow for PS4 Pro and PS5 Pro updates. And even though Nintendo considers the GBC to be the same console as the original GB when it comes to tallying sales figures, it's a rather significant upgrade. Slightly better than NES full color games, double the processor speed. It made a compelling upgrade and target for developers.

But glad to hear it’s becoming more common - I might check it out on Deck again soon.

----

I have long had a total fantasy in this vein... what Nintendo could have done is release add-on hardware to read old media. Imagine a hybrid mini-disc and cartridge reader which connects to the Wii U via USB, and a Gameboy cartridge reader which connects to the 3DS via... uh, possibly NFC, Gameboy games are small and the games could be read once and cached to internal storage.

You could use this to add backwards compatibility all the way back to the NES and Gameboy! Games from consoles two generations back could have been run natively, everything older could have been trivially software emulated.

I don't think such a product would have substantially interfered with Virtual Console sales, it would have been too niche. Probably too niche to make sense in real life... but in my fantasy, the goal would have been PR. It would cement the idea that buying a Nintendo game is an investment which Nintendo will support long-term; whether a large number of people make use of that ability is irrelevant.

I sort of feel like they were trying to fight emulation with a lot of their moves, doing things that were challenging to emulate, like the 3D stuff, or unusual hardware, etc.

A. Sony has an amazing marketing strategy where they can paint their #1 competitor as not even a competitor.

B. Xbox has a terrible product direction, where they are trying (failing) to beat Sony at being Sony instead of looking at the gaming industry and trying to create a product people want.

The Deck works for me since I rarely play for more than a couple of hours in a stretch (so I don't need 5 hours of battery life), and I don't need to stick it in a pocket. It's "just a PC", so you can still play non-Steam games on it if you need to avoid the Steam ecosystem for some reason. Its direct competitors (Asus/ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion and others) show there's a market for this type of device.

The Switch satisfies the needs for a lot of people people; great! Good ideas will cross-feed with those in the handheld PC gaming device realm.

Yep, works great with non-proprietary docks vs even using a 3rd party dock on Switch has led to bricked units.

> Have you ever tried to use physical media with a Steam deck?

I haven't tried, but I'd be surprised if plugging in a USB optical drive wouldn't work. That'd be pretty silly though, but so are some of the Switch physical releases when the bulk of some games isn't actually on the cartridge.

I think the better thing to look at is DRM instead of specific transmission format. Steam itself is a grey area for DRM (some games are DRM-free IIRC), but you can also use things like Lutris... or generally whatever you'd like. Takes a bit of tinkering, sure, but a whole lot less tinkering than getting anything unofficial to run on a Switch.

> Have you ever tried to get 5 hours of battery life with a Steam deck?

Yep, works great. I'll still give the point to Nintendo because they prioritize battery life so much more, but if you aren't running the SD at full tilt with a large 3D game, it can get decent battery life.

> Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket? (I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.)

I would love a Steam Deck Lite or something. That's probably the biggest reason I keep my Switch Lite: it's easy to just toss in a bag on a whim while the SD (and other Switches) require planning to actually use them.

> Nintendo will be just fine.

Yup. They're probably still sitting on piles of cash from the DS and now Switch. People were saying Nintendo was doomed when the Wii U did poorly, but others at the time rightly pointed out that they've probably got enough runway to have a few more total flops of consoles.

> I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.

Losing Newell is a valid concern (again, for Steam as a platform), but Nintendo is certainly an interesting choice to say they won't kick you out on a whim, given their track record of bans, lawsuits, and just being particularly litigious.

Yes!

Dude, you have to rebuy all the games you've already bought and already own every odd generation. Imagine paying for NES and SNES games, Wii and Wii U games and other old garbage you already own? That's Nintendo.

On steam you have absolutely massive library dating back almost 20 years by this point, and it comes with you every time you buy a new device, whatever it might be a PC, laptop or SteamDeck.

Yes, steamdeck is pretty large and bulky, but you can get 5 hours battery life on non-demanding indie titles (ie. Hades on the updated deck OLED models)

Yes, you can dock a Steamdeck to a TV easily.

It's all around better, completely open device, minus the size (and battery life in demanding AAA titles switch can't dream of running anyway)

Got any examples of a game doing recaps / control reminders? Curious to check them out

Using a tool someone else built is definitely the gateway to hacker mindset and culture

From there, it’s made sense that they would use pc-tier components rather than phone-tier as Nintendo is on.

There are some rough edges with the Steam Deck, but it's a bit odd to frame the Switch as "ready for mass consumption" when it lacks access to Steam, something every other handheld has, and consumers expect in 2025.

I would imagine the only reason they didn't launch with the OLED is to drive sales in the second half of the product lifecycle. If the PS4 equivalent claim is true that will be great, the Switch 1 was anemic at launch and borderline painful graphics in 2025.

However I do think B is true. The only time they were able to go toe to toe with Sony was most of the 360 era when Sony got cocky and built a machine that was too complicated to work with relative to the value developers got out of that effort. Once Sony stopped doing that they've dominated Xbox (mind you the whiff on being too early proclaiming the digital era made it far far worse).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2685900/Mind_Over_Magnet/

Err what? This has always been the point of a Nintendo console.

It’s like saying “the only reason people buy Windows/macOS is because they want an easy to use OS.” Like, yes. That is indeed the point.

It’s an expensive component and they brought it back for free he second gen so they must think it’s worth it

The closer Switch is to the Steam Deck, the more likely both will be targeted.

Something had to go and it was backwards compatibility.

So on one hand you have a walled garden, of the type that HN tends to hate (when it's Apple), but on the other hand you have an open platform that's significantly more powerful.

Similarly, a lot of the SNES internally looks like it was at least initially designed for back compat with the NES.

Slot-loading.

I mean, there's no fucking way you could fit a regular Switch into your pocket. I don't care how big your pockets are. So that doesn't really seem like a fair criticism.

One of the things I find sad about the Switch is in fact that Nintendo seems to think it fulfills the same niche that their portable systems did, but it doesn't even come close. I can fit my 3DS (XL or not) into a pocket very comfortably, not so with my Switch.

I don't have any current Gen console (nor have I played one) but as a long-time tech market "interested observer" my understanding is that XBox had a bit less raw power last Gen and tried correcting this Gen and succeeded in having a bit more raw power than PS5. However, it apparently didn't matter to the market. So it seems to be another example like Betamax vs VHS, where the product with somewhat better technology didn't win because consumers found other factors more important. In modern game consoles, I assume those factors would be some mix of exclusive titles, compatibility with existing previous gen game libraries, marketing+brand perception and, more recently, the console's subscription game service.

It's interesting that Microsoft apparently didn't internalize this lesson, since Nintendo has been remained competitive for ~20 years by combining significantly weaker hardware with high-quality franchise games plus a clever differentiating factor (novel interaction (Wii) or portability (Switch). Of course, it would be wrong to conclude "CPU/GPU power doesn't matter" because it's more complex than comparing mips, flops, rops, etc. It also depends on how much, and how well, developers and game engines optimize for a platform's hardware.

Microsoft definitely learned their lesson about high-quality franchise games with their recent (and very costly) acquisition spree including Call of Duty. Although, to get anti-trust approval it can't be platform exclusive for at least a decade. I'm wondering if MSFT's claims that they're happy to be a games software company selling on all platforms may actually be true. If so, it may not bode well for the future of the XBox hardware business - which would be sad because more competition is generally better for consumers.

I think Nintendo is- respectfully- in their own lane.

That's why it's considered its own category.

The Korean release of Gold and Silver, along with Crystal, did actually require a GBC.

https://www.techradar.com/gaming/is-the-xbox-series-s-holdin...

The gaming industry is huge and gamers are varied. What is fun and play to one person is boring and vapid to another. I think Nintendo's first party titles are generally excellent, but I recognize that they're not for everyone. It's not like the rest of the industry is shuffling around going "boy, if only we could figure out how to make fun games".

It seems that you want to exclude Nintendo from AAA gaming, which is also weird. Their first party titles are developed by large teams with big budgets. They're not some scrappy startup making indie titles.

FWIW, the game that won Game of the Year at the most recent game awards is Astro Bot - an amazingly fun and playful (some would say Nintendo-esque) game that is a PlayStation 5 exclusive.

(so, even if you could put a GC disk in, it didn't have capability to natively play the game)

I've played mostly 20+ year old games for years, and don't own a gaming machine or high-end console. I'm into Doom from the 90s, OpenTTD, and Morrowind. But TotK should have been better, in my opinion. The art style just isn't my cup of tea.

Need more Larians in the world.

If the switch had been a failure, then a lot of households that currently have a switch (only) would have bought a different console and that would likely have been a PS5 (even if they held on to their previous generation console, and waited a couple of years until the PS5 price dropped below $500)

I have a PS4 and a Switch at home. The kids play the switch and occasionally play on the PS4. I can't justify buying a PS5 because there's only so much gaming time available, and family gaming is covered by the switch and my personal gaming is good enough on my PC. Take the switch out of the equation and that changes.

PS5 is winning the AAA console lane, no doubt. But Sony could have been making more money if they could also own a significant portion of the family console lane.

It pays dividends, because they just don't ship junk, so everything they DO ship sells extremely well.

* Going all-in on bundling the Kinect, a very costly depth camera interface peripheral, with every XBox.

* Committing to making XBox an "all-in-one entertainment system" by building in an expensive HDMI input capability to enable being an electronic program guide, digital video recorder, Blu-ray disc player, streaming TV service and music service. The Kinect camera peripheral also had a built-in IR blaster to control all your other living room devices.

* Announcing pervasive DRM that would tie game discs to the user's account, prevent reselling or lending game discs.

* Aggressively pre-announcing no backward compatibility with previous XBox games. A senior XBox exec apparently told the media (on the record), "If you're backwards compatible, you're backward."

While the last two mistakes were walked back before the console even shipped, building in & bundling costly hardware couldn't be walked back. Nor could the significant investment in developing operating system and application software to support electronic program guide, IR control, video streaming and recording. These large hardware and software investments certainly came at the cost of investing as much in hardware and software to better render games, play games and support game development. You can kind of understand why MSFT thought each of these things would be good for MSFT strategically, but they were all tone deaf in terms of what their market wanted and fatal distractions from the main business of being a good game console.

I hope someday a definitive case study will be written giving insight into how otherwise smart, experienced executives can make so many catastrophic strategic errors over such a long period of time.

This is a very strange take for someone arguing for locking into Nintendo's most-recent ecosystem (where you're generously allowed to re-buy some of the games you already own from previous generations) over an open, linux-based hardware platform that connects to steam.

* Nintendo DS, 2004

* Nintendo DS Lite, 2006

* Nintendo DSi, 2008

* Nintendo DSi XL, 2009

* Nintendo 3DS, 2011

* Nintendo 3DS XL, 2012

* New Nintendo 3DS, 2017

* New Nintendo 3DS XL, 2020

PS is suffering from decreasing fan loyalty due to the not-that-good subscription service and not-that-exclusive game titles. Also, their pace of new hardware seems to be off considering the half-dead PS VR2 or that streaming handheld thing. The way I see it, the subscription service is supposed to be a counterpart to MS's game pass or XGP; the handheld thing is most likely to be a compromise from current gen (PS5) performance and NS's pressure. But don't forget their legacy from previous generations, they have *the most* experiences in developing and publishing 3A titles, which is why PS is still my most played consoles.

On the other hand MS had the issue of XSS dragging XSX down (as mentioned above by others), and their hardware sales seems to be losing momentum due to "If I can play it on Windows why would I need a XBOX". But from their past doings I think MS is always on the chasing of "Combining their all platforms together". While Windows Phone might turn out to be a failure, XGP actually did succeed, thanks to the huge user base they have on Windows.

Whereas NS has the exclusive advantage of their cartoonish/pixelated artstyle. This alone, in my opinion, saves them a ton of money. Not saying the artstyle is worse than realistic ones, but the development cost is indeed much much lower. Not to mention it requires much less computing power to render, resulting in cheaper hardware products. Their console can't run 3A, but that is actually a smaller downside than some may think. Because cartoonish/pixelated game and smaller indie game is a huge market.

So... Though the 3 manufacturers are competing in the same game console market, they each found a smaller but more suitable target market for themselves. If there has to be a "winner", profit-wise, it should be NS undoubtedly. Just look at their hardware upgrade cycle and console/game sales/profit.

The style is influenced by Breath of the Wild, but nothing about the development of Tears was held back by the Wii U.

I love the “just start playing” ethos of most Nintendo games. Reminds me of the games I used to play as a kid. No long story or exposition - just a game load screen and a start button

Nintendo has great games, but the resolution on TVs, even cheap ones, is outstanding now and it goes to waste using a Switch.

Playing a great game that also uses what the TV has on offer is really the best experience. If we get 4k and ray tracing on Switch I’ll be stoked.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/arts/video-games-graphics...

I think Sony probably feels they are doing okay, although they think they should be doing better than they are. It's Microsoft's XBox business that I think is in long-term trouble. While they may be profitable at the moment (I don't follow it closely enough to know), the brand and forward trends aren't looking good. To me, the massive acquisition spree buying leading game companies was a very risky 'bet all the marbles' kind of move. It was so expensive that to justify it, they not only have to win but win big. It's a huge bet on making their Game Pass service not only grow but increasingly profitable. And it has to win PC gamers and console gamers with a unified service. Maybe it'll work but the high costs and constraints limit the number of ways they can win while the number of ways to lose remains vast.

He explains it quite well. Sorry it’s German but I guess the information about the chips and reasons Nintendo choose them should be all over the net.

Yes, he references specific Nintendo interviews in the video. Frequently, in fact, and in detail.

But I never bought an OLED because I couldn't justify it for the amount I play my Switch handheld (almost never)

Also, there are things a modern "parallel demake" (like FFXV Pocket Edition) can do to reuse certain types of assets from its AAA sibling, that in the previous era would have required remaking those assets from scratch. So a modern demake can actually be cheaper to produce in some ways.

For examples:

• You can just copy-and-paste the script and associated audio assets straight over, as anything can play audio clips.

• You can also copy over all the animation "choreography" scripting for NPCs and cinematics, with the particular named animation cues just mapping to different actual animations for the simplified models.

• Depending on how your AAA game models environments, you might even be able to export the abstract "level data" (what type of terrain goes where; basic geometry and material-type for meshes of buildings; placement of things like furniture and other large freestanding decor objects) from your AAA game engine, and then import it directly into your demake's game engine. (You'll then still need to run over everything to add new decor and details, make sure nothing is clipping, etc — but this is still a major speed-up.) IIRC this is how the recent third-party-implemented Pokemon titles [Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee and BD/SP] were implemented — they started with direct dumps and imports of the original games' level data into their engine.

Nobody would say the Sega Saturn wasn’t a console because it couldn’t run Crash Bandicoot, or that the N64 wasn’t a console because it couldn’t run Final Fantasy VII.

The Switch may not run certain titles, but it can run other AAA, like DOOM, Mortal Kombat, No Man’s Sky, The Witcher 3 and more. Sure, those games may run better on more powerful hardware, but that hardware isn’t portable. That doesn’t make the Switch any less of a console.

Most AA and indie games are available on all platforms, and all the reeeeally popular ones like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, Rocket League, etc.

Easily 80% or more of the catalog is the same across all consoles.

So why we define what a console is by those games that aren’t on the Switch’s catalog?

All 3 consoles are doing the same, they sell a closed hardware/software solution with access to a propetary storefront where they sell you games, the same games mostly. Their marketing may be directed to different demographics but at the end they all do the same and compete for the same market.

(Their award that is 100% consumer/gamer vote based goes to mobile games, because they bribe their audience to vote for it.)

Sure, most of the time there are just a few trees, but when they want to they blow right past that