An interesting throughline of the FTC/Sony vs. Microsoft courtroom battle has been seeing a🦋ll the ways the FTC has tried to frame Nintendo as an outlier that shouldn’t be part of the console war conversation. All kind of arbitrary distinctions have been made, from the processing power of the Switch to its portability, to the fact that it started its current console generation before the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, to doubting that Call of Duty would even appeal to the “standard Nintendo audience”, whatever that is. PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said yesterday that he doesn’t view Nintendo as a direct competitor. This seems absurd to me. Both the Switch and the PS5 are computers you play video games on - a lot of the same video games. Is Nintendo’s gaming hardware really that different from Sony’s?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes Nintendo such an outlier in the console market, and while I remain ambivalent towards the notion that Sony and Nintendo are not in competition with one another, I can also acknowledge that the Switch is a fundamentally different device than a PlayStation or an Xbox. While Sony and Microsoft make boxes that run games, the way you operate Nintendo’s consoles is an experience in 🍃and of itself. There’s something to be said about the progre🎀ssion of Nintendo’s hardware designs and how much that impacts the experience of playing Nintendo games. If there’s anything that separates Nintendo from the rest of the console market, it’s the fact that what Nintendo makes is so much more than a PC with proprietary parts.
That wasn’t always the case, of course. The NES and Super Nintendo look pretty much exactly the consoles that came before them, and the ones they were competing with at the time. The same could be said for the Game Boy and other handhelds like the Game Gear and the Atari Lynx. The N64 and the Gamecube began to show a penchant for experimentation with their controllers, ꦕbut it was the Wii that first broke the mold of what a gaming console could be, and set Nintendo on a path of wild and wonderful innovation.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see how Nintendo’s handheld and home consoles were destined 🐻to one day join together in the Switch. The Wii gave us a new way to interact in games with the Wiimote and Nunchuck, while the DS allowed us to take 3D console games like Super Mario 64 on the go. The 3DS was another huge leap in portable gaming that also made a pivot towards digital purchases, while the Wii U nearly bridged the gap completely by including both a home consoleꦕ and a portable one. The Switch feels like the culmination of everything Nintendo has done before, and recent developments indicate that this might be the end of the road, at least in terms of innovative hardware.
All signs suggest that the next Nintendo console will be an iteration on the Switch, rather than a brand new platform like the Nintendo consoles that came before. During an investor’s call this week, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said the next Nintendo will use the Switch’s account system in order to “ensure that customers can make the transition smoothly”. We also have reason to believe the next Nintendo console will be backwards compatible, thanks to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot’s recent comments about supporting Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope on the next generation Nintendo console. Colloquially, we’ve all been calling the next Nintendo device “Switch 2” for years, taking for granted that, in the past, Nintendo has never made the same console twice. The Switch seems to be Nintendo’s perfect form, and as much as I love it, I’m also sad we’ve reached ꦏthis point.
From here on out, we’re probably looking at a future where the form factor and function of the Switch remains the same, but the hardware improves with every generation. The Switch 2 will be faster, the screen will be bigger, and the processor will be processory-er. We’re never going to get the 💦kind of wild swing between generations like we once did with the Wii and the Wii U, or between the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. The Switch is Nintendo’s ultimate device, and now all it can do is make minor improvements from generation to generation, just like Sony and Microsoft. If they’re not direct competitors now, maybe by the time we get to Switch 4 they will be. I don’t want the Switch to change dramatically, but I’ll always miss the era when we couldn’t predict what Nintendo would do next.