It's nice to know they're at least being sensible and following what is now the industry standard.
No BC would have been a massive fail and significantly hurt the system's prospects.

It's also just nice to have them acknowledge the successor's existence; as a Switch owner since 2017 I'm getting antsy lmao

It's nice to have this confirmed officially, though I would have preferred Fukurawa to give us something even more.

The expected since we were almost sure the sucessor would be most similar to the Switch architecture. There was never a real reason for it not to happen appart from the few people coming with the usual " Buh Nin-tendo " rethoric we usually get in these cases.

Anyway, our library of games is safe everyone!

Although I do wonder what this means for the Eshop on the launch day of the sucessor... Will we get a new re-started experience or will it just be a straight up continuation of where we will be ?

My hope is for an expanding ecosystem with Switch 2 being more like a second layer than a separate experience.
It can also function as an upsell mechanism by showing that second later to Switch 1 users while limiting purchase/download access to Switch 2.

However it happens, I hope that Switch 2's EShop functions better than Switch 1. Because very early on I started using the web version instead because certain trailers wouldn't buffer effectively, causing a lot of skipping; or my long lists being laggy and slow to navigate; or outright crashes. I hope Switch 2 dedicates some resources to this for a slick experience.

Pretty sure the newer CPU will do the job just fine for it. That was one of the initial problem with the Switch.

NAND is a bad form of long term storage, they tend to bit-flip/bit rot and lose data.

Mask ROM is the preferable choice as that is the typical form of memory in Nintendo's carts in the NES/SNES/N64/Gameboy/Gameboy Advance/DS and can last decades.

Many Switch and even 3DS carts are using "hybrid" memory where Rom and NAND are bundled together or they just use plain NAND and as such... Some of the older carts have started to fail.

The downside to ROM is that it's expensive and it's capacity doesn't scale upwards. - But arguably... Considering there is no *real* need for physical media above 32GB as most games just fill as much space with uncompressed 7.1 audio and 4k FMV in an inefficient format anyway...

MicroSD cards themselves also use lower grade NAND chips, where higher quality NAND chips are reserved for SSD's and carts themselves are trying to cheap-out as much as possible to garner maximum profits... And well. You get the idea.

Plus the lack of Ram.
The console needs to constantly swap data in and out of it's limited Ram pool which causes hitching and stuttering throughout the stores UI.

No! If you want physical backwards compatibility you need to make a "special i f..... want my physical games super account". This you have to confirm in your email. In order to confirm this email you need to do another special account "my i am othorisised to confirm my confirmation email for physical backwards compatibility account". Then you have to phone Nintendo, tell them your social ensurance number, age and adress. After that you need to confirm a special message on your current Switch that your games can now played with your new system....

No! jokes aside!🤣 Of course its backwards compatible physical and digital!

Short answer: Yes!😎

Excellent.  Good to hear.

Yeah, especially if they aren't used for a long time. Therefore I turn on my old consoles and handhelds with memory cards/sticks (for save games / settings or even game downloads) for a few minutes at least once per year (f.e. PS1, PS2, PSP, PS Vita, DS, 3DS, Wii U).

As far as I understand it, Nintendo game cartridges since the Nintendo DS (and the PS Vita cartridges) don't use Mask ROMs anymore but flash-memory-based "XtraROMs"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Game_Card

Which makes me "a bit" worried about my DS-, Vita-, 3DS- and Switch-games on cartridges.

But at least, the durability seems to be a lot better than data on rewritable NAND memory (microSD cards and SSDs):
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/270216-nintendo-switch-cartridge-eprom-or-maskrom/

"As macronix had stated themselves, their "XtraROM" HybridFlash technology are guaranteed to hold data for at least 20 years, and that definitely doesn't sound like it's Maskrom to me. the fact that macronix had explicitly given us this estimate leads me to believe that they've already done all the relevant testing on these XtraROM chips beforehand which led to their 20 year estimation of data retention for this particular product."

Since the Nintendo DS has its 20th anniversary this month (time flies!), the next years will be interesting with reference to reports about DS games stopping to work.

And the upside to "XtraROMs" is, that it's capacity should scale upwards (because it's flash-memory based) and should have similar cost reductions over the years as microSD cards and SSDs.

Tariffs could be disastrous for the Switch 2 launch in the U.S.