Will the Switch 2 have some secret sauce? If so, what?

[Shadow1980]

I doubt it. Gimmicks have been very hit or miss for Nintendo. The DS's two screens worked out well, but adding glasses-less 3D to its successor did not. Motion controls worked out very well for the Wii, but the tablet controller didn't help the Wii U one bit and might have been a detriment to it.

Also, some of those gimmicks were simply already-existing tech, or tech that was very similar in terms of concept. Motion controls had been attempted since the NES days. The Wii was just the first one to do it right. Touchscreens had existed well before the DS or Wii U used them. Second-screen tech and connecting handhelds to a TV had a conceptually-similar predecessor in the GBA's link-cable connectivity with the GameCube. Also, there was the Sega Nomad, which was a handheld version of the Genesis with TV-out capability. Even the Wii U's tablet controller was like a reverse Switch, allowing you to play a home console game remotely on a handheld device.

What other tech for "new" ways of playing is there that Nintendo hasn't already tried? VR? I can't really see that going anywhere on the Switch 2. It's not even mainstream on PlayStation, or anywhere else for that matter. The tech is better than it was in decades past, but despite years and years of hype VR seems to be struggling to become mainstream, much less *the* way of playing video games. It's pretty much a guarantee that the next-gen Nintendo console will literally be just a Switch 2, i.e., a next-gen Switch. Just a modular "hybrid" console, this time with at least PS4-level horsepower. Assuming it keeps all the same features, it'll have motion controls with its Joy Cons as well as a touch screen when playing in handheld mode, so it'll already have features that have been established for generations. Nintendo has literally done it all. Not only is there no need for radical new innovations, but there may not be any to be had anymore

I'd also argue that, thanks to certain mistakes they made, Nintendo was essentially forced to improvise with all sorts of gimmicks with their home consoles after struggling to compete directly with PlayStation for two straight generations. The Wii paid off immediately. Instead of a Wii 2 that was just a Wii with 360/PS3-level power, they tried something new with the Wii U, which failed so badly that Nintendo stopped making "traditional" home consoles. So they only had two non-conventional home consoles, and while the first one succeeded, the second was an unmitigated disaster for the company (which is a shame because I thought it was a great console). One wonders whether if they took the safe route and just released a Wii HD instead of the Wii U it would have done well. Perhaps they felt, arguably rightly, that motion gaming was declining in popularity and that they had to try something different, therefore making the Wii U another case of trying something new out of necessity rather than by choice.

With their handhelds, they've actually been a good bit more conservative. The GBA was just a more powerful Game Boy in terms of functionality. With the DS, they supposedly didn't actually intend to have their new dual-screen system be their flagship handheld, but it blew up in popularity after the Lite revision and essentially displaced GBA sales. If the DS had become a more niche product, then it's probable they may have made a single-screen GBA successor.

The 3DS is basically just a more powerful DS with glasses-less 3D added. It's unclear exactly what effect, if any, those 3D capabilities had on the 3DS's sales. What is clear is that its high launch price hurt it ($250 being a lot at the time for a system like that), Nintendo clearly overestimating how much people were willing to pay for such a system. The impact of mobile is harder to estimate. The high sales of certain DS games and the subsequent lack of success of those kind of games on the 3DS certainly suggests that a lot of casuals that bought the DS didn't bother with the 3DS, but the Switch far outselling the 3DS (which it still would have done by a comfortable margin even without, well, you know) in the face of a now well-established mobile market just complicates the issue. The 3DS did well enough for itself despite failing to replicate the DS's success, but I still think the right question to ask there is not "Why did the 3DS sell half of what the DS did?" but rather "Why didn't it sell as much as the Game Boy Advance?" or "Why did the DS sell so much?"

With the 3DS selling "only" 75M units and the Wii U being a flop, resulting in the 2013 to 2016 period being the company's worst period for hardware shipments since the mid 90s (software fared better, but still hit 15-year lows by the 2016-17 fiscal year), Nintendo was once again forced to change things up.

Nintendo doesn't have to innovate to distinguish themselves anymore from PlayStation & Xbox, and they've filled their own separate niche in the TV gaming market for the past 16+ years. They haven't run into any other complications that necessitate any big changes. Finally, they have had the handheld market on lock for over 30 years. They found something that works with the Switch, a system that combines the best of their home console and handheld strategies into a single unified platform. They have a formula that's guaranteed to sell over 100M units each generation so long as the games are there. They knew they had a bad track record with their post-SNES home consoles, but their handhelds always did very well. I think they also felt that there was still demand for home console gaming, so they weren't quite ready to write off the TV gaming experience entirely and move to a pure handheld. The Switch's "best of both worlds" approach was arguably the right choice to make at the time, and it paid off massively. It was far bigger jump in power than any other they had with a handheld unit, with enough power to also be a reasonably high-quality TV gaming experience.

But having a single unified platform does have the consequence of painting themselves into a corner. They can't afford to take risks with radical new concepts anymore (again, if there's any to be had), and I don't think they will. I fully expect the Switch 2 to be a return to the more conservative Nintendo of the pre-Wii days.