I mean, Nintendo has released iterative successors before; SNES was a stronger NES, Gamecube was a stronger N64, GBA was a stronger Gameboy.

After a few years, a console loses all its novelty to me. Just like all things. You get a new car, it's amazing, you cherish it, you're wowed by it... until suddenly, one day, it's just a car. I'm that way with consoles, too. They're exciting at launch but then just become a platform. I start itching for the next thing. And as I mentioned, in the past, that meant paradigm shifts. Whole new ways to play, whole new mechanics, whole new everything. So when it was announced that S2 was basically just S1, and after eight whole years? lol. For me, you might as well have said you weren't even launching anything at all haha. 

Man, things sure have changed.

Yeah but most of those allowed for fresh experiences. Mode-7 gave us pseudo 3D gaming, and that audio chip produced near-CD quality sound. When you played the best SNES games, you didn't feel like you were playing NES games. It felt brand new. When you played Mario 64 for the first time, it was nothing we'd ever seen before. Same with Rouge Squadron 2. It was such a massive leap forward, that it felt fresh. The generational leaps were just so great that it didn't feel the same at all. Not to mention new controllers with new buttons which produced new ways to play etc. It was always exciting.

The S2 is mostly the exact same product, same form factor, (mostly) same controllers, and its games are barely different, so it doesn't mask it. If you've played MK8D, you've played MK World etc. It's just one long, fourteen year cycle. It's not even close to the same thing.

As a note, if you have one copy of Witcher 3, everyone in your family can get a free copy of the remaster just by loading the original onto their Switch 2 and playing the original on loan their own account.

Some Switch 2 Editions are free upgrades, others cost a small upgrade fee (usually around 5 to 10 percent the price of the full game, like 5 quid for small studio or indie games). These usually add higher resolution graphics, remaster content, and Switch 2 features like mouse controls.


As for why Nintendo went with a mainly vertical upgrade rather than focusing too much on the lateral is because there was no business case for it. During the NES to N64 era, lateral advancement was pretty normal in the industry. The more vertical focus began with the PS2, where consoles and physical interface largely resembled their previous generation except for the power. Nintendo’s strategy has always been to capture new users in a fresh and untapped market. The only time they haven’t done this is in their handheld lines when they had no real competition. Gamecube was kind of a vertical upgrade from the PlayStation much more so than the N64, and so that’s why Nintendo flubbed there. Switch 2 has no real competition in its niche, and so Nintendo’s job here is to make that niche more attractive than other niches (namely Playstation style home consoles, tablet gaming, and to a lesser extent: mobile and notebook PC) or at least attractive enough to get in addition to another niche (namely all of the above plus desktop PC… I think VR is a kind of in its own little world right now… for now).

Bottom line, it’s risky to follow up with a big new lateral change, it could fail much like the Virtual Boy and Wii U did. And considering Nintendo so thoroughly owns the hybrid console niche which has been shown to be as high as 160 to 170 million potential sales (depending on how new markets receive it) making a vertical upgrade is the logical and (from the perspective of fiduciary responsibility) the correct choice.

The leap in power from Switch 1 to Switch 2 is huge; titles like Cyberpunk 2077 or Dragon's Dogma 2 don't feel like Switch 1 games at all, they're not only massively better looking but bigger and more complex as well.

Even Nintendo's games, while graphically conservative, are doing things that wouldn't have been viable on Switch 1 without atrocious performance like Donkey Kong Bananza's extensive voxel-based destruction, 24 karts per race in an open setting in MK World, or massive enemy counts and insane amounts of chaos in Splatoon Raiders.

S2 allows for many experiences not possible on S1, just like SNES did over NES or GBA did over the Gameboy.

If the leap from S1 to S2 was huge, then what was NES to SNES, SNES to N64, and N64 to Gamecube? Because if we're calling S1 to S2 huge, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to invent a new adjective to describe to people just how massive it felt going from SMB 3 to DKC, or from LTTP to OOT. Huge just won't cut it anymore.

Those leaps were also huge, even more so cos technology was so primitive and still developing at the time whereas it was more mature by 2025.

S1 to S2 is still a really, really big leap though.

I mean, here is a high end third party port on S1:

And now S2: