The Nintendo Switch is generation...

[Jumpin]

These Generations shared between platforms are an artificial and arbitrary concept that haven’t really meant much in about 12 years. Nintendo’s hardware is not related to Sony or Microsoft’s so there’s little point in trying to pretend like it is.

If we’re talking Microsoft/Sony, it’s the 3rd generation.
If Sony alone, the 4th.
If Nintendo, it’s the 7th for home consoles, 4th for handhelds, or 1st for hybrids (I kind of like that one =D)

I honestly have no idea how people get the whole idea of 8th and 9th generations, at most we’re on the 7th. The concept of generations of consoles began with the birth of the 16-bit generation - and the stuff before it was designated the 8-bit generation. Some guys on wikipedia fabricated two earlier generations that NEVER EXISTED. Making up two arbitrary groupings of consoles prior to the NES adds nothing important to the conversation of videogame history - except misleading information. It is not how we (old-time gamers) saw it as it happened:

Gaming hardware prior to the 16-bit was seen as kind of a waterfall of releases, there was new stuff coming out all the time and most of it was junk, the rest of it shit - but it was all damn cool at the same time. Your friend had one of the Ataris, you had a Commodore something, and you heard about a dude who had a Vic 20 or Amiga... your really nerdy rich friend had an Apple with monochrome green and black, and another with some kind of an IBM featuring a math game with cats on it.. The best games were still in the arcade. The first major gaming consoles with substantial brand-based fans were the NES and SMS, then the SMD and SNES followed as the first really discernible next generation of consoles.

Maybe we can take a page from actual history and assign the mess prior to the NES as the “Pre-dynastic” or “Pre-generational” era. If we have to have these generations.