The Nintendo Switch 2 reveal played it safe, and that’s a good thing

thesixthaxis.com:

The Nintendo Switch 2 reveal was about as unremarkable as you could imagine for a new console generation reveal. It’s like the Nintendo Switch, a little bit bigger, a little bit… snappier, there’s a Mario Kart on screen, and that’s about it. For a company that’s so often been about spiritual successors that experiment and play with confounding new ideas, this is a direct sequel that slaps a 2 on the end.

Nintendo played it safe, in other words, and that’s exactly what they needed to do.

As popular and enduring as Nintendo has been, the company has always had a tendency to be a bit boom and bust. From the highs of the SNES, the Wii, you had the lows of the N64, GameCube and the Wii U, all of which were unable to keep pace with the dominant consoles of their era for one reason or another. The saving grace for Nintendo’s bank balance was that they always had great success with their handhelds. Sure, the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo 3DS were a step down from the industry-altering hits of the Game Boy and Nintendo DS, but the GBA sold over 80 million and the 3DS eventually passed 75 million and I can think of a console manufacturer that would bite your hand off to have those sales figures.

Nintendo don’t have that lifeline anymore, with the Nintendo Switch having become their all-in-one handheld and TV console. This was a genius move back in 2017, consolidating both their audiences, and letting them unite all their development teams around a single platform, but now they’re faced with having to make a new console generation with much less room for mistakes.

So the Nintendo Switch 2 keeps it simple. The reveal trailer shows a console that is built around the same fundamental principles, a hybrid console with detachable controllers that you can play handheld, docked, or as a tabletop screen. But it also showed key areas of improvement.

The Nintendo Switch 2 looks familiar, but a new Mario Kart is long overdue – image credit: Nintendo

A slightly bigger screen follows the trend