I think people weary of how Switch will fair after the release of the next gen are missing a few key things:
1. The transition to the 9th generation is likely to be very slow. It took years for most third parties to stop releasing their big games cross-generationally. The first *big* third party game to release exclusively on the 8th gen was Arkham Knight, in June of 2015, a year and-a-half into the new generation. In the context of this generation, that would be June 2022.
2. The fact that this gen will likely be backwards compatible with the 8th gen, will only encourage publishers to want to use the Xbox One/PS4 as the base console, with the more powerful consoles pursuing better frame rates and resolutions, like 120 FPS and native 8K, at least early on.
3. Software tools have increasingly focused on scaleability, and with the success of the Switch and the massive existing userbase for PS4/Xbox One, that will likely only encourage developers to further focus on that in the future. Scaleability is how ports of Doom, Wolfenstein, and many other high-end games made it to Switch.
And finally: The Switch will likely be receiving it’s own full-blown successor within the next few years, potentially as early as holiday 2021 (though somewhere in 2022 is more likely). Portable tech has already come a long way sense the Tegra X1, and a new model will do a lot to help the Switch catch up with the other 9th generation consoles. I would imagine a future Switch will be capable of PS4 (or at least Xbox One) levels of graphical fidelity.
Many developers will be eager to move on to the next generation, but I think most publishers will put a leash on that, especially given the development costs that come with increased graphical fidelity. Outside of the first party publishers, economics will almost certainly slow down the transition. If these consoles are expensive as rumored, that’ll slow adoption from consumers, and third parties aren’t going to be enthusiastic about moving away from a console install base that collectively surpasses 200 million, to cater exclusively to a userbase that’ll be a fraction the size for it’s first few years and way more expensive to develop for.
