Nintendo Switch 2 will avoid the fate of Wii U | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

There's this anxiety within the industry regarding Switch 2, which is around this notion that Nintendo tends to follow a success with a flop.

Nintendo followed the smash hit Wii with the Wii U failure. Nintendo 3DS sold half as many units as the DS. It's a trend, you see?

In truth, that analysis isn't quite right. Nintendo's handheld business has always been relatively robust. The numbers fluctuate, but you wouldn't classify any of Nintendo's portables as failures. In terms of home consoles, things have been in steady decline for decades. If you draw a line from NES to Wii U, Nintendo has dropped around 10m players with each generation... the Wii being a rogue anomalous spike in that decline.

The Switch is its own thing. Both a handheld and a home console. But there's no denying its portability is a key selling point, and so I'd be inclined to look at sales of Nintendo's handhelds as a better indicator of where things may go.

Yet really, looking at historical data only takes you so far. And that's because the industry, and the playing behaviour of gamers, has shifted significantly since even the Wii U era. That's why Nintendo's confirmation of backwards compatibility was so important with Switch 2.

"Convincing players to move between generations is getting harder, and that's no surprise when the games they love still run perfectly well on older hardware"

Backwards compatibility is the norm with Nintendo. The Game Boy Advance, DS, 3DS, Wii and Wii U all had some form of it. Yet whereas it was a nice feature for those products, I'd argue it has become essential in the modern age. To quote former Sony boss Shawn Layden, we're entering an era of games hardware where the differences are so small "only dogs can hear them". I'm not suggesting the technical leap with Switch 2 won't be significant, but the reality is that gamers today are happy playing titles that are ten years old (or even older). They still look and play very nicely, and titles like Minecraft, The Sims 4, and