The Boring Switch 2 Reveal And A Warning From Nintendo's Past President
Also Sony cancels as many live service games as it promised to release and Marvel Snap gets snagged in the TikTok ban
Almost everything about the Switch 2 leaked ahead of time, including when Nintendo would finally show the world what it’s been working on. A two-minute trailer dropped with zero pomp and circumstance showing it's bigger, it has magnets, and it's going to play a new Mario Kart.
Otherwise there was no release date (probably after June and before Christmas), price (likely between $400 and $500), or even confirmation of the handheld's new size (maybe 7.9 inches). To learn anything else about the new console fans will have to wait until an April 4 Nintendo Direct at which point live demos will take place across several major cities. Analysts predict plenty of inventory whenever the Switch 2 does eventually arrive.
Nintendo showed only the bare minimum it needed to and nothing more. Fans will be feasting off of a few seconds of Switch 2 Mario Kart footage for months (24-player races? Fuel tanks? Changing character art styles?). Otherwise the presentation seemed tailored within an inch of its life to signal the company's intent to build on the Switch's legacy rather than revolutionize it without revealing anything major as it continues squeezing every last drop of blood from its current eight-year old stone (Donkey Kong Country Returns HD is out now, Civilization VII next month, and Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition in March).
There are two camps of reaction to the Switch 2 reveal. One is put off by how boring it seems. Digital Trends' Giovanni Colantonio laments that the game console as high-tech toy era is over. "In a world where upgrades are inevitable, iteration is enough," writes Polygon's Austen Goslin, comparing the reveal to a slick new iPhone tease. Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese is worried Nintendo has been sucked into a vortex of “iterative updates and sensible-ness.” My own colleagues at Kotaku debated if the Switch 2 is weird enough after contributing editor John Walker foreshadowed our collective disappointment.
The other response ranged from grudging respect to outright relief that Nintendo didn't do something crazy like make it foldable or turn it into a AR/VR headset. Chris Dring argues at VGC that Nintendo's reputation for reinvention was spurred by business necessity rather than sheer whimsy and in 2025 the business case for upgrading its most successful home console ever is obvious. "Reinventing the wheel is overrated–just ask 12,000 years of wheels," quipped Chris Kerr at Game Developer. IGN's Matt Kim argued if it's not broke, don't fix it, and suggested the only thing wrong with the current Switch is the horsepower.
The original Switch reveal video garnered 11.4 million views when it was released making it Nintendo's most-viewed YouTube video at the time. The Switch 2 video is already over 17 million views with tons more across social media. Despite the obvious business case for staying the course, Wall Street was less impressed. The stock was down almost 5 percent from the news.
The Switch 2 is a historic inflexion point for Nintendo. Andy Robinson points out that this will be the last console launched by its first class of famed developers like Shigeru Miyamoto. It is also the first new hardware generation completely developed after the passing of former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. His last Nintendo Direct appearance was April 1, 2015, ten years and one day before the bigger Switch 2 showcase coming in the spring.
Iwata had a warning for Nintendo at this very moment. "Speaking personally, I think nothing is more hazardous than staying the course," he says in his posthumously published memoir Ask Iwata. "Nobody can say for sure when to make a change. When Nintendo takes a different tack, there's no telling whether it will take one year, or two, or three, or even five for people to catch on."
He continues, "But staying the course means not having a future. If you maintain the status quo, you wind up fighting for survival, and gradually your fanbase disappears. That's the one direction I'm always trying to avoid. There's always the question of how far you can shift and still have people understand and follow along. However, forging straight ahead will get you nowhere."
This philosophy grew out of something Iwata's predecessor, Hiroshi Yamauchi, told him early on. "If Nintendo tries to fight, it's gonna lose. Don't waste your energy on fighting." Yamauchi was the one who told Iwata and Miyamoto to make a game console with two screens. They thought it was a metaphor for "do something that hasn't been done before." Eventually, Nintendo released the DS. It's still the company's best selling device ever.
The company's worst selling console ever is also a significant data point. The Wii U was a disaster. Coming off the incredible success of the Wii, Nintendo tried to "shock people in a good way" and arrived at a set of trade-offs nobody wanted and new ideas that weren't quite ready. But probably the biggest reason the Wii U flopped is the games just weren't any good.
The Switch launched with arguably the best Zelda ever (Breath of the Wild), and one of the best Mario games ever (Odyssey), in its first year. It was bolstered by a deluxe port of the best Mario Kart most people had never played (MK8), Splatoon 2, and a bunch of indie games perfectly suited to the new formfactor. The Switch didn't succeed because it was a portable console, it succeeded because it was a portable console that could play some of the best games of the last decade.
Capturing that lightning in a bottle a second time will be the real challenge.Nintendo's next slate of first-party games is what really matters and it's the one thing that hasn't leaked about the Switch 2. If Nintendo can somehow find a way to once again reinvent 20-year old franchises, it'll be forgiven for otherwise launching the most boring-looking new console in its history.
[Instead of trying to track the notoriously secretive workflows of Nintendo’s various internal teams I’ve shared the rough number of years since the last major release in each of Nintendo’s best-known franchises. This includes externally developed games and splitting some franchises up into 2D and 3D variants, as well as fudging some of the delineations between Switch ports and truly new releases.]
So what will we actually be playing on the Switch 2? Outside of I and a bunch of likely third-party ports of PS4 games and some older PS5 games, a new 3D Mario seems like a good bet for its first year (it might even be the first truly open world game in the series if it builds off of the excellent side-experiment Bowser’s Fury). Metroid Prime 4 could be a cross-gen release like Breath of the Wild, perhaps making use of the apparent mouse functionality of the new Joy-Con to differentiate it on the Switch 2.
Despite remasters of older Donkey Kong Country games, its been more than a decade since the last new game in the series, and Nintendo put the titular ape front and center in its recent Mario Bros. movie. We’re also due for a new Smash Bros. (director Masahiro Sakurai left his YouTube side-gig over a year ago), Luigi’s Mansion, and Yoshi’s World. A new Animal Crossing can’t be too far off either. Are Kid Icarus, Star Fox, and Punch-Out about to make a comeback? I’d bank on at least one new franchise being debuted alongside the Switch 2 as well.
Finally, the most important Switch 2 reaction of all: my kids’. I showed them (5 and a half, 3 and 10 months) the reveal the day after before their afternoon quiet time (playing alone in their rooms). The youngest responded in three acts.
"It's a Switch! It's a black Switch! I love a black Switch!" he shouted gleefully.
The oldest stayed completely silent. Neither understood it was a “next-gen” Switch or what that entailed. They were both more impressed with the Super Mario Bros. Wonder art showing backwards compatibility than the tease for Mario Kart, which didn’t scan to them as a new game either.
So I explained what Nintendo didn’t: this was a new console that had a bigger screen and controllers and would play new games they didn’t currently have.
“Oh, oh, like maybe a new Zelda?” my oldest piped up, finally getting exited. He suggested maybe it would be the Zelda game from the picture in his room (an old GameStop promotional poster of 2009's Twilight Princess). Or maybe even a new Pac-Man game. "Remember when you chomp the ghost?" he explained.
“It'll be out later this year,” I told them. They immediately knew when: "For Christmas?!"
Live service interrupted
Former PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan has said a lot of things that came back to bite him in the ass.
“I was at a Gran Turismo event recently where they had PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 games, and the PS1 and the PS2 games, they looked ancient, like why would anybody play this?” he told Time magazine in 2017. “I get a little bit frustrated at still being hit over the head with this one,” he later told Axios when reflecting back on the flippant comment.
"We do believe in generations…we are thinking that it is time to give the PlayStation community something new, something different, that can really only be enjoyed on PS5,” he told GamesIndustry.biz in 2020 before proceeding to release a bunch of those PS5 games on the last-gen PS4.
And then in 2022. “Through close collaboration between Bungie and the PlayStation Studios, we aim to launch more than 10 live service games by the fiscal year ending March 31, 2026,” Ryan told Sony investors at the time. Three months later that number jumped to 12. That was right after it spent $3.7 billion to acquire Bungie.
Ryan is now long gone and Sony has one more year to make good on that forecast, but it’s a lot better at cancelling live service games than shipping them. It’s biggest success story so far, Helldivers 2, feels like something Sony stumbled into by accident (it was also developed externally building off an existing and already popular franchise).
[The above chart is collected from official announcements, press reporting, and credible rumors. It’s impossible to know which games Ryan was thinking of when he made his original forecast, and it could include things that still completely unknown to the public. Neon Koi, formerly Savage Games, was working on a mobile game for example, though it was aimed at being a live service loot shooter before the studio was shuttered.]
This past week, Jason Schreier reported that Sony had thrown two more projects onto the live service pyre: a multiplayer God of War spin-off from Bluepoint and an online game from Bend Studio. Jeff Grubb said Sony is “shell-shocked” after the unprecedented failure of Concord last year and taking a harder look at its first-party portfolio, especially live service projects.
Sony now appears to have canceled at least as many live service games as it once promised to ship, though it still has at least half a dozen more currently in development or rumored to exist, including Bungie’s Marathon, a sci-fi extraction shooter that was already facing a rocky development and will now face even more scrutiny.
It’s obvious why Sony would be so committed to making live service games: they have exponentially more upside if they succeed than single-player games. But the way the company’s gone about executing on that strategy seems, in hindsight at least, rushed, chaotic, and full of hubris.
BioWare’s Anthem came out in 2019. The risks of pivoting a single-player, story-driven studio (which almost all of Sony’s teams are) to a live service model and then asking it to ship a a new blockbuster IP from scratch were made resoundingly clear, only to be echoed against last year by the similar failure of Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad.
But then sometimes it works and you get Rare making Sea of Thieves which launched rough, grew into something truly novel and special, has reached over 40 million players, and is no doubt headed to Switch 2 this year or next (that’s an educated guess, not insider info).
"Forecasting sales is a black magic," recently departed PlayStation veteran Shuhei Yoshida said on Kinda Funny Games this week. “After so many years in making games and in the industry I don't trust any marketers who say they can forecast game sales. Who would have predicted Helldivers 2 would sell more than Spider-Man 2 so that's the nature of the business.”
The former exec said Sony didn’t remove resources from single-player games but rather flooded the zone with additional money to take risks on live service bets. Yoshida said if he had still be in charge of PlayStation studios at that point, however, he probably would have "tried to resist that direction,” before joking that maybe that was why Sony replaced as head of studios with then-Guerrilla Games studio head Hermen Hulst.
"You cannot plan a success in this industry,” he concluded. “That's the most fun part of this business.”
Some quickfire updates from the rest of the live service gaming world:
Pokémon TCG Pocket has announced the first details of its card trading system and players hate it. In addition to a resource requirement you can’t share the game’s rarest cards, like golden Charizard Ex, which is mostly what the most diehard players (and those who spend the most in the game) are still hunting for.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League just revealed its central premise was scam. A final story update capping off the troubled multiplayer shooter’s short-lived life told players that every hero they had killed was actually a clone and Batman planned it this way all along, except for Wonder Woman and Robin who did actually die. It was a fitting sendoff for the ambitious but unfortunate misfire.
Genshin Impact will pay a $20 million fine to settle charges from the FTC that it was misleading players, especially young kids, about loot box odds for its rarest characters. The regulator has proposed an order, which still needs to be reviewed by a judge, that would “prohibited from selling loot boxes using virtual currency without providing an option for consumers to purchase them directly with real money.”
Marvel Snap has been Thanos snapped out of existence in the U.S. following a Trump-proposed, Biden-endorsed ban of TikTok. ByteDance, the Chinese owned company that publishes both apps, seemingly removed the popular superhero card game from former Hearthstone devs out of spite. They were as surprised as everyone else. “Marvel Snap isn’t going anywhere,” Second Dinner wrote on X. “We’re actively working on getting the game up as soon as possible and will update you once we have more to share.” You can still download it on Steam but there’s no way to login.
[Update 1/21/24 10:06 a.m. ET: Marvel Snap is back online following the surprise outage but still inaccessible from the app stores. The team announced it’s working to make sure something like this never happens again, including finding a new publisher that isn’t owned by ByteDance. Second Dinner has also promised fans will be “compensated” for timed-rewards, missions, and other content they missed while the game was offline in the U.S.
Patch notes
Lost Castle 2 v0.6.1.2 “Fixed the issue where the character's height may be abnormal when using skills with the single-handed weapon ‘Barbarian Bone Axe.’”
World War Z patch 1.64 is all about tweaking casino chips in its Las Vegas episode. Among the fixes are more jackpots and clearer prompts for picking up chips from slot machines.
Diablo IV build 2.1.0 for season 7 addresses a major loot complaint by making Ancestral items drop more frequently and making the minimum Legendary affix stat roll no worse than the max roll on a non-ancestral item.
The Axis Unseen version 1.091 reduced the number of save backups from 100 to 20 to save space, and also removed the Sasquatch from the demo area so players don’t get wrecked before figuring out how to play.
Gunfire Reborn season 4 adds new stages, weapons, and lots of hero adjustments. It also added a customer service feedback entry on the loading screen so players can ping devs with complaints while waiting to load into the online lobby.
Links and other stuff
Esports has utterly collapsed but the culture around competitive Overwatch is thriving and maybe enough to mount a comeback. (Katelyn Burns / Defector)
Go read Polygon’s latest feature series called Culture Shock about all of the weird and fascinating ways international games and local audiences collide. (Multiple / Polygon)
Super Mario Bros. speedrunner Niftski’s latest record has brought the historic game within .03 seconds of “absolute perfection.” (Damien McFerran / Time Extension)
How Microsoft nixing a private doctor for staff at Candy Crush maker King sparked unionization efforts. (Rebekah Valentine / IGN)
Heaven’s Vault writer Jon Ingold has a harsh assessment of writing in games more generally, including the "massively overwritten and really tedious" critical darling Disco Elysium. (Samuel Horti / NY Times)
Parents of a child killed in the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history helped make a game to educate people on the harrowing and increasingly familiar tragedy. (Simon Parkin / The New Yorker)
I'm not a Switch player. But I think people complaining about a lack of innovation are missing the point. Handhelds might be poised to be the new prime console generation, with the Switch and Steamdeck in commanding leads. Nintendo is being smart here. Sony and Microsoft's handhelds look daft by comparison to those two.
Great write-up, I'd just like to add that the Twisted Metal live-service game wasn't even fully greenlit, as per Jason Schreier, so its cancellation comes with an asterisk.