XBox Series S Could Be A Nice Bounce For Switch 2

[Wman1996]

CaptainExplosion said:
I just hope this doesn't lead to Nintendo cutting the Switch's life short just to get the Switch 2 out.

It won't. Nintendo has never accelerated a new platform for sake of specs. But a Switch 2 and Xbox Series S spec gap will obviously not be as big as a Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/PS5 gap. Or especially the massive, massive gap between Switch and Xbox Series X/PS5.

The Game Boy Color, which is either a successor or mid-gen refresh to the Game Boy depending on your view, didn't come out until 9 years after the Game Boy. That's crazy. Developers had been begging for a Game Boy successor with better specs. Nintendo started plans for Project Atlantis in the mid-90s. It would've launched in 1996 or 1997 and had specs similar to the Game Boy Advance. But oh boy, would that have been expensive in the mid-to-late 1990s, and would've had poor battery life.

Even mid-gen refreshes with better specs (DSi and New 3DS) could've launched earlier than they did. Both launched about 4 years into the platform's life, instead of 3. Clearly, Nintendo didn't have big worries about DS and 3DS specs.

And on the home console front, that certainly hasn't been the case either. Switch (a hybrid) came out about 4.33 years after the Wii U. But that accelerated release was not about specs. I mean Switch was only going to have the same amount of RAM, 2 GB, as Wii U initially. Though of course the other specs would be improved. The accelerated release was due to Wii U being a failure.

The Nintendo 64 (originally Ultra 64) was supposed to come out in 1995. It didn't come out until 1996 in Japan and North America. Clearly Nintendo was not overly concerned about the aging specs of the SNES.

Switch 2 will launch in 2023 or 2024. I think 2022 is cutting Switch too short as Nintendo's main platform, especially if it's in the first half of 2022. But 2025 is too long. The Switch specs will be very antiquated by then and consumers will have lost quite a bit of interest.

TL:DR - The Xbox Series S and its specs will not force Nintendo's hand to get the Switch 2 out sooner to close the specs gap, which is more feasible than the Switch 2 ever competing with Xbox Series X and PS5 specs.