Over the decades, Nintendo has cultivated a reputation in which it seemingly strives for innovation in gaming over simple iterative upgrades. The Wii and DS were perhaps the most obvious instances of this, pushing Nintendo into the stratosphere by appealing to mass audiences beyond the usual hardcore crowd.
With the Switch 2, Nintendo is seemingly playing it pretty safe, offering up a console that – mouse controls aside – more or less updates the Switch's current features with more powerful hardware. It makes sense, too; a quick sense check online indicates that most fans are still pretty happy with the hybrid nature of the Switch, and aren't quite ready to move on to something completely new just yet.
In speaking with Easy Allies, however, ex-PlayStation vet Shuhei Yoshida believes Nintendo may be "losing their identity" in offering up a mere iterative upgrade with the Switch 2:
"To me it was a bit [of a] mixed message from Nintendo. In a sense, I think Nintendo is losing their identity, in my opinion. For me, they are always about creating a new experience, designing hardware and games together to create something, [an] amazing new experience.
But Switch 2, as we all anticipated, is a better Switch, right? It's a larger screen, more powerful processor, higher resolution, 4K, 120fps... They even had the hardware person starting the stream, like other platforms do, right? And because it's a better Switch, the whole core premise of the Switch 2 is, you know, 'we made things better', and that's something other companies have been doing all the time."
He goes on to say that for folks who only play Nintendo platforms, the closer parity to competing consoles is a great thing, but for more passionate gamers who perhaps own multiple systems, the third-party games shown during the Direct were – in his words – "ooh...".
Let's not forget that Nintendo has offered systems in the past that, by and large, offer up iterative upgrades on what came before. Game Boy to Game Boy Advance, DS to 3DS... It's been done before, and with GameChat and mouse controls, we reckon the Switch 2 is offering up just enough innovation to make Switch 2 a more unique proposition compared to other platforms.